[sudo-users] FYI: sudoers entries now don't work through symbolic links

[John Little]

Hi all,

I haven't changed my sudoers set up for several years, but after release 
upgrading to Ubuntu 23.10, sudo 1.9.14p2, a couple of entries stopped 
working.

For example, in /etc/suders.d/btrfs I had

john     ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:/bin/btrfs*

/bin on Ubuntu, and IIRC debian-derived distros, has always a symbolic 
link to /usr/bin, or at least for over a decade. Changing the entry to

john     ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:/usr/bin/btrfs*

and it works fine.  sudoers(5) describes the FOLLOW tag, but it only 
seems to apply to sudoedit. There's no other mention of symbolic links.

I had the impression that /bin is the canonical place for exceutables; 
that's why we put /bin/bash in "shwbangs".

-- 
Regards, John Little