Debian – adding a sudoer in debian

debianrootsusudousers

After a long search on the web, trying everything I can find I came to ask you guys, how can I add an existing user to be a sudoer?

I've tried

usermod -a -G sudo user

and also

adduser user

both while in root…
the first one didn't work at all and the second one supposedly added 'user' to sudoers but when I try to run sudo with that user it says:
user is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.

When I run adduser again, it says the user 'user' is already a member of 'sudo'.

what can I do???

-EDIT: for clarification, I do want the user to be prompted for a password when trying to run sudo. currently when the user is running sudo he is being prompted for a password and then he gets "user is not in sudoers file…."
I wand him to be able to run sudo, be prompted and then escalate the privilege.

Best Answer

As root edit /etc/sudoers and place the following line:

youruser    ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:ALL

after

# Allow members of group sudo to execute any command
%sudo   ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL

In this way you will be capable to execute all commands that require sudo privileges passwordless.

In order to use sudo and be prompted for a password you need to remove

NOPASSWD:ALL

Related Solutions

Sudo – How to Add a User to Sudoers File

You need to have root access to add a user to the sudoers file. So either

su - root

(and put the root password in) and then use

visudo

as root to make the relevant and correct changes, or ask your sysadmin.

You usually want something like,

username    ALL=(ALL) ALL

or,

%groupname  ALL=(ALL) ALL

and put your user ID into that group, but how you configure sudo depends on the standards for your environment.

Changing the sudo config file should only ever be done with visudo (to prevent being locked out by making a bad change), and it should only be done by someone who understands how to configure sudo safely (personal soapbox: sudo is not the tool some people think it is).

How to find out if I am sudoer

To know whether a particular user is having sudo access or not, we can use -l and -U options together.

For example,

If the user has sudo access, it will print the level of sudo access for that particular user.

   $ sudo -l -U pradeep
     User pradeep may run the following commands on this host:
     (ALL : ALL) ALL

If the user don't have sudo access, it will print that user is not allowed to run sudo on localhost.

   $ sudo -l -U pradeep.c
     User pradeep.c is not allowed to run sudo on localhost.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Sudo – How to Add a User to Sudoers File

How to find out if I am sudoer

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