Month: November 2010

The Ten Commandments from IT / Sysadmins…

Thou shalt not release software to production on the eve of a weekend or a holiday.
Thou shalt not use corporate email servers to distribute full page pictures of your kitten, or your child, or your horse, or your hamster.
Thou shalt not browse porn from your work computer or laptop. Ever.
Thou shalt use corporate / IT mandated applications for corporate related work, regardless of whether you think RandomFinancialTool is better.
Thou shalt choose Microsoft products ONLY when all alternatives have been thoroughly reviewed and considered objectively, and using the criteria of “But it’s not compatible with Microsoft products” is usually a red herring.
Thou shalt not rely exclusively on the ‘genius’ or ‘vast experience’ of a single person within the company or organization. They might be wrong. How would you know?
Thou shalt consider a laptop expendable and subject to imminent destruction.
Thou shalt understand that IT and sysadmin staff are employed to HELP the users do their job. We may know what we’re talking about.
Thou shalt not page a sysadmin at 2am because you’ve forgotten your password. Next time be more careful.
And last but not least…..
Thou shalt respect us. We’re people too.

How to make sudo use your login name

This is being tossed out there as a handy reference to sysadmins around the world.
Sudo is a magnificient tool for Unix / Linux based systems that allows a single command to be executed as the root / privileged user. The advantage is that the command is logged to the syslog, and access to sudo-managed tools can be tightly controlled via /etc/sudoers.
One problem that comes up a lot is that logged activities on a host will show up as ‘root’ when sudo is used to invoke them, when what you really want is to know who initiated the command.
The sudoers file can include an option that tells sudo to not reset the users login name when escalating priveleges. The option is:

Defaults        !set_logname

Putting this option in sudoers will make it so RCS checkins and other tasks will log as the user who invoked the sudo, not root.