Ubuntu implements a number of practices out of the box to make the default installation more secure. One of these practices is the disabling of the root account and the use of sudo
for superuser privileges. The sudo
program provides a much more robust set of features to increase user privileges as compared to the traditional su program.
The sudo
command's configuration file can be found at /etc/sudoers
. By default, Ubuntu provides a basic file that allows root users to do anything as any other user, and allows members of the admin group to become root users (the user that you create at the time of installation is automatically added to this group).
The sudo
package provides a tool called visudo
that you should use whenever you want to make changes to the file. Therefore, to view and edit the /etc/sudoers
file, type in the following command:
sudo visudo
The reason you want to use visudo
is that it automatically checks your sudoers
file for mistakes...