sudo problems. anyone feeling up to it?

[John Abreau]

As a sanity check, I'd verify whether it's being removed by sudo
or by python:

    ALL     ALL = NOPASSWD: /bin/bash

    sudo bash
    echo $HOME

After verifying which was responsible, the next thing I'd wonder
is whether SELinux is doing something unexpected.



On Mon, July 21, 2008 2:07 pm, Steven W. Orr said:
> We have a bunch of old debian sarge distros running and we're slowly
> upgrading to Ubuntu Feisty Fawn.
>
> For reasons that are not important here, we need to run our python app as
> root. So we added
>
> ALL     ALL = NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/python
>
> to the sudoers file. (Yeah yeah don't start.)
>
> The problem is that under the FF release, sudo is acting broken, i.e., not
> like the man page sez it's supposed to. Under FF, I lose my HOME envvar.
> I'm not supposed to lose it.
>
> 503 > sudo python
> Python 2.5.1 (r251:54863, Mar  7 2008, 04:10:12)
> [GCC 4.1.3 20070929 (prerelease) (Ubuntu 4.1.2-16ubuntu2)] on linux2
> Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>>> import os
>>>> os.system('bash')
> root at vma-sorr:/home/sorr# echo $HOME
>
> root at vma-sorr:/home/sorr#
>
> Also, I have one more piece of info: As root, I say
>
> sudo -V
>
> and I get this partial output
>
> Environment variables to check for sanity:
>          XAUTHORIZATION
>          XAUTHORITY
>          DISPLAY
>          LOGNAME
>          HOME
>          TERM
>          LANGUAGE
>          LANG
>          LC_*
> Environment variables to remove:
>          PERL5OPT
>          PERL5LIB
>          PERLLIB
>          JAVA_TOOL_OPTIONS
>          SHELLOPTS
>          PS4
>          BASH_ENV
>          ENV
>          TERMCAP
>          TERMPATH
>          TERMINFO_DIRS
>          TERMINFO
>          _RLD*
>          LD_*
>          PATH_LOCALE
>          NLSPATH
>          HOSTALIASES
>          RES_OPTIONS
>          LOCALDOMAIN
>          PS4
>          SHELLOPTS
>          CDPATH
>          IFS
>
> So it *says* that it checks HOME for sanity and it *says* that HOME is not
> in the list of variables to remove.
>
> But under any other machine I have access to, I do not lose HOME. I
> suppose it could be a bug, but I doubt it. Does anyone have any
> suggestions?
>
> --
> Time flies like the wind. Fruit flies like a banana. Stranger things have
> .0.
> happened but none stranger than this. Does your driver's license say Organ
> ..0
> Donor?Black holes are where God divided by zero. Listen to me! We are all-
> 000
> individuals! What if this weren't a hypothetical question?
> steveo at syslang.net
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John Abreau / Executive Director, Boston Linux & Unix
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