Nothing like getting a good morning scolding — especially from an operating system. All I did was enter a very simple command
sudo fdisk -l
Which is only supposed to read the fdisk output (showing the layout of the hard drive). Anyway, because poor little Eric wasn’t logged in as root (even though I am root and Eric), the system got very snappy with me. And not just snappy, but snappy in a tendentiously philosophical manner:
We trust you have received the usual lecture from the local System
Administrator. It usually boils down to these three things:
#1) Respect the privacy of others.
#2) Think before you type.
#3) With great power comes great responsibility.
[sudo] password for eric:
eric is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
Chagrined at the possibility of being reported to myself, I wondered just who the “we” are. Some code writer in some fantasy world somewhere who thought this up, I guess. It’s actually funny. What I can’t decide is whether the overall intent is broad enough to encompass satire. I certainly hope the author is not serious, but even if he is, I guess things could be worse. He could be working for the government!
Comments
5 responses to ““This incident will be reported.””
Heh, heh, now go put your bad self into a corner until you have decided that you have been punished long enough. And ,no dessert after dinner for you tonight either.
sudo as distributed by Sun (solaris) and HP (hpux) versions of unix (and maybe IBM’s AIX, the “almost” unix) has the same warning, and a mail is sent to (placed in the folder of) root.
The first lines always appear (the warnings). The last line only appears to those not authorized in the sudoers file.
You should remember that unix, of which linux is a derivative, was designed as and is principally used as a multi-user operating system. You are using it as I do now, as a one-person system.
That said, it does seem a little extreme, but having served as a unix administrator on multiple systems servicing hundreds of programmers of varying skill levels and varying levels of common sense (and integrity), the warnings are definitely needed, if often unheeded.
We were always very careful who we granted sudo to, and what functionality we allowed. We made their boss sign off on it also. But if they needed it, they got it.
Personally, I almost never logged in as myself, always root, and would su to my or some other id as necessary to resolve issues.
I forget who developed and retains responsibility for sudo. Gnu?
Heh, heh, now go put your bad self into a corner until you have decided that you have been punished long enough. And ,no dessert after dinner for you tonight either.
It is worse than that. The sys. admin will get his dessert.
I asked a systems person to change some file permissions once. She told me to use sudo, i.e. she didn’t want to be bothered. So I tried that, got this message, and a follow up scolding email from the head systems guy. I went back to using my old method… which was to su to root. I, and many others, knew the root pass years before any of the systems people started working there.
I asked a systems person to change some file permissions once. She told me to use sudo, i.e. she didn’t want to be bothered. So I tried that, got this message, and a follow up scolding email from the head systems guy. I went back to using my old method… which was to su to root. I, and many others, knew the root pass years before any of the systems people started working there.