Wednesday, November 13, 2013

sudo on Debian Etch

While Debian Etch is horribly out of date, I still have a couple of servers that I administer that require Debian 4.0 aka Etch. One unfortunate bit is that it seems that the version of sudo (1.6.8p12-4) packaged for Etch is horribly broken. Specifically, it does not seem to prompt for a password to give elevated privs. Even when modifying the sudoers file to specifically say authentication is required (via the authenticate Defaults and the PASSWD tag) allows passwordless entry. The fix that I have applied is compiling the sudo package from Lenny sudo source package. The source package is available at Lenny sudo (1.6.9p17-3)