sudo within sudo

[Gillian Bennett]

Hi,

this is my first mailing to this list (I am cringing with everyone else at the thought of a newbie) - I have only just started looking at sudo. I am very sorry if this is in the archives, but after searching them I was not able to locate an answer for this problem.

We are running an old version of sudo - 1.5.6 - on HPUX 11.0.  Yes, I know that it is an old version of sudo;( Not too sure what other info you will need, bit reluctant to send everything in config file coz old version and most likely open to all sorts of naughty things. Also, I had absolutely nothing to do with this install so am totally unable to give any information about options, flags or whatever to do with its installation. for this I am very sorry.

The reason I am writing this email is because some developers here have used sudo in some of their scripts and I am trying to debug a problem that is happening wrt archiving databases. 

a script is run as any old user that can sudo as oracle which contains the command:

sudo -u <user> <bkp_files>

The file bkp_files then makes another sudo call

sudo -u root tar cvf - <files to backup> | gzip -3 > bkup file

Our problem is that we are getting a tar error:
tar :cannot stat <some file>

on just some of the files (seems to be those with ownership other than that of the original user) that can be fixed if all perms on all dirs and files tobe tar'd is changed to 777 - which is undesirable.

Also, the tar runs fine on the command line.


Thanks, Gillian



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