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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

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Systemd wants to expand to include a sudo replacement (outpost.fosspost.org)

submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (2 children)

Agreed, this is a nice inclusion. I also hate sudoers with a passion - I already use doas but it's not standard (in the Linux world anyway), but with systemd providing an alternative means that it'll become a standard which most distros would adopt, and I hope this means we can finally ditch the convoluted sudoers file once and for all.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 6 months ago (2 children)

How does doas differ from sudo?

Never heard of the former until now.

[–] [email protected] 35 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

doas is quite popular in the BSD world, and was ported to Linux a few years ago (via the OpenDoas project).

For starters, it's is a lot smaller than sudo - under 2k lines of code vs sudo's 132k - this makes it lot more easier to audit and maintain, and technically less likely to have vulnerabilities.

Another security advantage is that doas doesn't pass on the environment variables by default (you'd have to explicitly declare the ones you want to pass, which you can do so in the config).

The config is also a lot simpler, and doesn't force you to use visudo - which never made sense to me, visudo should've just generated the actual config, instead of checking it after the fact. Kinda like how grubby or grub2-mkconfig works. But no need for that complexity with doas.

Eg, the most basic doas config could just have one line in the file: permit: wheel. Maybe have another line for programs you want to run without a password, like permit nopass dexter cmd pacman.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

Awesome. Thanks for the insight.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (2 children)

Essentially functionally stripped sudo, smaller in size than sudo. See also Pottering's thoughts about the ecosystem

[–] [email protected] 13 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Nice to see that Mastodon has the same problem as Twitter with people trying to use it for long-form blog posts for some godforsaken reason.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago

Makes sense considering people who moved from one micro-blogging service to another instead of giving up on the idea completely are probably the ones deeply committed to that flawed idea.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

Blame the Mastodon team, if you're not running a fork, you have to go into the source and adjust the character limit manually.

Nobody has to do it like this, Mastodon supports longer posts since other servers and clients support more, it's seemingly just a choice from upstream.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

I admit, I’m not a big fan of putting more functionality into systemd (or just of systemd in general), but that is a well-reasoned argument for having sudo live in the init system.

[+] [email protected] 18 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

[deleted]

[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

The thing with this is: its just a symlink to the systemd-run binary, which talks to PID1 to spawn new processes (in separate cgroups IIRC). Its one of the most fundamental parts of systemd. Even the debian systemd package includes systemd-run.

I guess the other question is if some tools the distro provides might switch to supporting it by default. For example on Arch there is makepkg that should never be executed as root, but does internally call some things with elevated privileges (mostly pacman to install and remove packages). Currently it checks for sudo and if not falls back to su, but maybe it might be worth considering changing su for run0 if its guaranteed to be there.