Configuring sudo access for administrative tasks

There is a way to delegate administrative access to users in RHEL, and it is done with a tool called sudo, which stands for Super User Do.

It not only allows you to grant full administrative privileges to users or groups but also to be very granular about the privileged commands that some users may be able to execute.

Let’s start by understanding the default configuration and how to change it.

Understanding sudo configuration

The tool has its main configuration file in /etc/sudoers and includes this part in the default configuration:

root ALL=(ALL)  ALL
%wheel    ALL=(ALL)  ALL
## Read drop-in files from /etc/sudoers.d (the # here does not mean a comment)
#includedir /etc/sudoers.d

Let’s analyze these four specific lines one by one to understand what they do:

1. The first line enables the root user to use sudo for any command that they want to run:

   root ALL=...