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I'm on debian and want sudo to use ldap instead of /etc/sudoers. Anyone have exprience doing this?

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Modern sudo has the ability to use ldap. In my opinion, this is clunky and failureprone, but that's just my experience. http://www.gratisoft.us/sudo/readme_ldap.html

I definitely prefer to use netgroups to expand local sudo configs instead of relying completely on ldap. My rule of thumb is, if it's necessary to run the server, it should be local. Only nonvital user accounts, etc go in ldap/nis/whatnot.

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  • +1 for distinguishing between vital and non-vital accounts.
    – cas
    Jul 23, 2009 at 4:58
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I don't think this is failureprone since you can have a local backup sudoers file, so even if your LDAP server is down you can still use SUDO on it to maintain it and so admins can restore the connexion to the LDAP server.

It is very simple to do, and you will prefer having one centralized sudoers file rather than many local sudoers when you have something like more 100 servers to manage.

In addition look at this, extract from the sudo website :

Using LDAP for sudoers has several benefits:

  • Sudo no longer needs to read sudoers in its entirety. When LDAP is used, there are only two or three LDAP queries per invocation. This makes it especially fast and particularly usable in LDAP environments.

  • Sudo no longer exits if there is a typo in sudoers. It is not possible to load LDAP data into the server that does not conform to the sudoers schema, so proper syntax is guaranteed. It is still possible to have typos in a user or host name, but this will not prevent sudo from running.

  • It is possible to specify per-entry options that override the global default options. /etc/sudoers only supports default options and limited options associated with user/host/commands/aliases. The syntax is complicated and can be difficult for users to understand. Placing the options directly in the entry is more natural.

  • The visudo program is no longer needed. visudo provides locking and syntax checking of the /etc/sudoers file. Since LDAP updates are atomic, locking is no longer necessary. Because syntax is checked when the data is inserted into LDAP, there is no need for a specialized tool to check syntax.

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I was able to compile sudo with the option --with-ldap that allows it to use an LDAP directory. sudo source comes with a schema that can be loaded into LDAP and allow it to use the directory instead of /etc/sudoers

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I presume you mean to say that sudo should use ldap ;)

Easiest way to do this is to grant sudo to a group via /etc/sudoers, and then control the membership of that group via ldap.

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  • While that is one way to do it, I believe Joe was asking about how to have the sudoers file be in LDAP instead of read from the filesystem.
    – Kamil Kisiel
    Jul 23, 2009 at 0:47
  • I put the LDAP (active directory) user or group in the sudoers file and it works well for me. I don't think there is a straight forward way to get the sudoers functionality into the LDAP in a useable manner.
    – J.Zimmerman
    Jul 23, 2009 at 9:24
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We tried putting sudoers in ldap, but found the easiest way to manage sudo (and access controls) was to combine ldap group membership with a centralized config management tool which could push acl and sudoers files to a server or groups of servers.

We use pam_access to control access to servers, and puppet to distribute files and enforce acls, but there are other config management tools like cfengine which would also work.

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