Used properly, the sudo utility can greatly enhance the security of your systems, and it can make an administrator's job much easier. With sudo, you can do the following:
- Assign certain users full administrative privileges, while assigning other users only the privileges they need to perform tasks that are directly related to their respective jobs.
- Allow users to perform administrative tasks by entering their own normal user passwords so that you don't have to distribute the root password to everybody and his brother.
- Make it harder for intruders to break into your systems. If you implement sudo and disable the root user account, would-be intruders won't know which account to attack because they won't know which one has admin privileges.
- Create sudo policies that you can deploy across an entire enterprise network even if that network has a mix of Unix, BSD, and Linux machines.
- Improve your auditing capabilities because you'll be able to see what users are doing with...