Remote editing through ssh and sudo

Remote editing through ssh and sudo

[maghac]

Hi, can anyone tell me if TRAMP in Emacs will help me in the following
scenario:

I am admin for a certain application on a Solaris server and need to
edit text files (shell and perl scripts) in the installation. The only
way to access the server is via ssh. No ftp or sftp. For security
reasons, I am not allowed to log in as the app owner user, but instead
I have to log in with my personal login with ssh and then use "sudo su
- app_admin" to switch to the app owner user. Sudo will of course ask
me for my password when I do this.

Just to add to the complexity, I need to do all of this on a windows
box.

Would be grateful if anyone can point me in the right direction. I
read stories about people having issues getting TRAMP to run under
windows.

Re: Remote editing through ssh and sudo

[Michael Albinus]

maghac <magnus.hacker@gmail.com> writes:

> Hi, can anyone tell me if TRAMP in Emacs will help me in the following
> scenario:
>
> I am admin for a certain application on a Solaris server and need to
> edit text files (shell and perl scripts) in the installation. The only
> way to access the server is via ssh. No ftp or sftp. For security
> reasons, I am not allowed to log in as the app owner user, but instead
> I have to log in with my personal login with ssh and then use "sudo su
> - app_admin" to switch to the app owner user. Sudo will of course ask
> me for my password when I do this.

Tramp 2.1 shall support this. Read about multi hops
<http://www.gnu.org/software/tramp/#Multi_002dhops>.

> Just to add to the complexity, I need to do all of this on a windows
> box.
>
> Would be grateful if anyone can point me in the right direction. I
> read stories about people having issues getting TRAMP to run under
> windows.

Tramp and cygwin's ssh do not work together pretty well. Using PuTTY
seems to work in most of the cases.

Best regards, Michael.

Re: Remote editing through ssh and sudo

[Jonathan Groll]

On Sun, Aug 31, 2008 at 12:14:27PM +0200, Michael Albinus wrote:
>maghac <magnus.hacker@gmail.com> writes:
>> way to access the server is via ssh. No ftp or sftp. For security
>> reasons, I am not allowed to log in as the app owner user, but instead
>> I have to log in with my personal login with ssh and then use "sudo su
>> - app_admin" to switch to the app owner user. Sudo will of course ask
>> me for my password when I do this.
>
>Tramp 2.1 shall support this. Read about multi hops
><http://www.gnu.org/software/tramp/#Multi_002dhops>.

Need to read further, but in theory do multi-hops support the scenario
where your regular user is not a sudoer, but wants to edit files as
root on the localhost. Can there be an intermediate 'su' step?

E.g. on my mac I don't really trust the default security, so I log in
as a regular user who is not in the sudo file. To edit files as root,
I first have to su to an account that is in the sudoers list, and only
then can I sudo to become root.

Cheers,
Jonathan.

Re: Remote editing through ssh and sudo

[Michael Albinus]

Jonathan Groll <lists@groll.co.za> writes:

> Need to read further, but in theory do multi-hops support the scenario
> where your regular user is not a sudoer, but wants to edit files as
> root on the localhost. Can there be an intermediate 'su' step?
>
> E.g. on my mac I don't really trust the default security, so I log in
> as a regular user who is not in the sudo file. To edit files as root,
> I first have to su to an account that is in the sudoers list, and only
> then can I sudo to become root.

Shall be possible.

> Cheers,
> Jonathan.

Best regards, Michael.