Re: PROPOSAL: gksu for authentication



On Sat, 2003-11-22 at 21:38, Sven Herzberg wrote:
> WHY should we have it in GNOME?
> 
> We should start to provide "run as" functionality in several parts of
> the desktop. The first part should be the run dialog. The next big one
> was Nautilus with "open folder as ...". You may find more...
> 
> I basically would like to see the next panel depending on gksu and
> starting the run as stuff like we start the gsearchtool nowadays.
> 
> gksu is well maintained and actively developed for almost 2 years now is
> is really stable (at least for me).

I use gksu routinely in conjunction with synaptic.  It is stable and
very useful.  However, I have to wonder;  why does it behave like "su"
and not like "sudo"?  sudo removes the need for all administrators of a
machine to know a shared root password, incorporates access controls for
commands, and gives a log of exactly who did what. the "run as" example
would still need to use 'su'-like behavior (prompting for the root
password), but I think that for administrative tasks gnome needs a more
sudo-like behavior (prompting for the user's password, and checking
against /etc/sudoers.) 

Down the road, this leads to a tab in the "users" control center applet
where you can give finer-grained control over who can do what tasks
(installing software, rebooting the computer, changing the time,
configuring system services, etc.) All of these would simply be edits to
/etc/sudoers, or possibly /etc/group.

-Fred
-- 
Fred Smith <fps dividedsky net>
Divided Sky Internet

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