Re: Doing Linux admin work with Emacs

[pjb@informatimago.com (Pascal J. Bourguignon)]

bebop52 <gruenderteam.berlin@googlemail.com> writes:

> Thanks to everybody for the detailled and helpful information. I'm
> going to quit doing regular work as root, thats for sure. I like both
> ideas, using tramp or having a second emacs window (with different
> colours) used only for admin work - I have to give it a try.
> So I really do need only one user instead of my two different users
> that complicate my life tremendously.
>
> I'm still a bit confused about the admin rights:
> - is it common and secure to surf the web as a non-root standard user
> WITH system administration rights?

That would depend on the meaning of "administration rights".  That's the
problem with GUI, they set you far apart from the semantics.

Classically administrators were users that were in the wheel or root
group (gid = 0 in /etc/group).  This allowed them to access files
assigned to the wheel group, and some programs like su would filter out
users not in that group.

Nowadays, sudo is favored, and an administrator would have to be in
/etc/sudoers.


But at a GUI level, there could also be another kind of management of
"administrators", with an independent database and gateway tools.


> - are giving a user admin rights and giving him sudo-rights two
> different, independent concepts? 

Good question.


> I now have two users with admin
> rights, but /etc/sudoers  has only one uncommented line: "root
> ALL=(ALL) ALL" and /etc/sudoers.d/ is empty.

When I want to be able to use sudo, I do:

su - bash -c "echo 'pjb ALL=(ALL) ALL' >> /etc/sudoers"

Perhaps there's other ways to configure sudo. Reading the documentation
would be good.



> - did I get it right that the option to use tramp sudo/su is available
> to standard user WITHOUT system administration rights too?

su yes, sudo no.  sudo checks that the calling user has the right to use
sudo, so that the calling user may use the su account only giving his
own password.


su only check the password of the su user, which the normal user has to
know, whoever he is.  su is similar to ssh root@localhost (but ssh
itself can be configured to prevent root connection, or to prevent
connecting to the root account automatically with the authorized_keys
features).



> When I get this user stuff straight I would only need to find a (easy)
> way how to connect to alice dsl from an xterm session, then I wouldn't
> need no gnome desktop anymore, just xterm and emacs.

Notice that emacs also contains a terminal emulator similar to xterm:

M-x term RET

In term, most keys are sent to the terminal.  Use C-c b  to switch to
another buffer and go on with normal emacs life.

So theorically, you could also avoid xterm.


To connect to a router, in general you can use the web (but they often
require javascript or java, so that rules out emacs-w3m), or telnet or
ssh.

Try out:

M-x shell RET 
telnet $ip_of_your_router  RET

To get out of telnet, type C-] q RET



-- 
__Pascal Bourguignon__                     http://www.informatimago.com/