Distributing the sudoers file using rsync as a non root user

[mlh at zip.com.au]

Phil,

You need to do the distribution in three stages.
1. copy from source machine to source machine staging area.

2. using an unprivileged account scp to a staging area
on the destination machine.

3. on the destination macine use a root crontab to copy from
the staging area to /etc/sudoers.


Of course there's a few security things to be wary of there.

You can make the transfer a little more secure by using something
like restricted secure shell (http://rssh.sourceforge.net/).

Also, you could digitally sign in step1 and as part of step3,
have root check the sigs before finally installing.

Regards,
Matt