Re: [gentoo-security] Prevent users to login directly

[Bart Alewijnse]

gentoo-security@l.g.o

(Sorry, Mr. Aleksandrovich, and possibly other people, for the double
post. I wasn't paying attention, and gmail is being indecisive)

Well, call me precaffeinated if you must, but if you're only using it
locally, and also have root login, you can make it passwordless, so
that no one can use it to login, and only root can do a su emerge, but
it's a bit of a weird thing to do.
But as I recall, you can specify, in sudoers, the ability for
*specific* users to su to *specific* other users. So I don't seen a
reason you couldn't make a 'sudo su emerge' work with a passwordless
emerge account.

It's a little moot, because you want them to only have temporary full
(read: root) access while emerging, and that's -never- going to be
secure, you might as well give them admin rights and get it over with,
rather than hacking funky effective-group running combined with sudo
or something odd like that.

(at uni we used to have test systems, for things like kernel module
development, that had a 'sudo su root' option. *waits for minds to
boggle* Yeah. I still don't get exactly why. I mean, assuming there's
a vague point to sudo su nonroot, there's basically none to sudo su
root. Perhaps in this case, where you cold enable specific users to do
that, but on these systems anyone could, iirc...)

--Bart Alewijnse

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