Of course he knows.

Read his original rant, as babarock suggested:

https://plus.google.com/u/0/102150693225130002912/posts/1vyf...

I read the rant (again) and imho it seems like sudo could very well be used as a solution to his problems ("need to have the root password to access some wireless network, or to be able to print out a paper, or to change the date-and-time settings"). From my point of view it seems like the real issue is bad default configuration for sudo (or an alternative system).

The problem isn't that Linus isn't aware of sudo (of course he is), but a stupid implementation in of the printer tool in OpenSUSE.

Agreed. Does openSUSE use PolicyKit for CUPS like Fedora does, or does it depend on lpadmin group membership?

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/CupsPolicyKitIntegrat...

I find it hard to believe that you read his original 'venting'. He's complaining about the need for root permissions to connect to a printer. It was about his daughter and the school network.

No. I read Oracle's version in the Oracle article, which is the subject of this discussion after all. It's been many years since you couldn't connect to a wifi network or configure printers without anything beyond your own password, a properly configured sudo and a sensible set of permissions. In fact, I haven't entered a root password on any of my machines since 2008 or so. It's been a while since any of them even had a root password.

What Oracle is bragging about is that some parts of Solaris 11 are saner than OpenSuSe's. Having deployed to SuSe machines a couple times in the past, that's one thing I don't find particularly hard to believe. I have no direct experience with Solaris since version 8 or so. I did enjoy using OpenSolaris and OpenIndiana for a while and would consider deploying them on my home server, as soon as I build it.

I also find Linus' attitude towards fixing the problem rather than ditching the distro commendable. I wouldn't give most distros a second chance after giving me a tiny fraction of the problems he describes in his own rant. After the problems I experienced, I didn't even give OpenSuSe a first chance on my own machines. Life is too short to bitch on Bugzilla.

sudo would give root. RBAC gives only the privileges you need for the task.

"sudo su -" would. You can restrict sudo to give a set of users a limited set of tools, such as restarting specific daemons but not others.

If you'd read the article you discover that sudo's capabilities are far more limited than RBAC's.

For example, RBAC can prevent a process from performing any network operations. Read the blog entry for more information.

I didn't say sudo can do everything RBAC can. I said "sudo" would allow Linus to do everything he wanted to do without giving (or even having) a root password.

But you implied that sudo could limit privileges to only those needed for the task based on your reply to the original poster. While sudo can limit the user to only running a utility for printer configuration, as an example, it can't limit the actions of that utility, so my point stands.

I wonder if SELinux could be used to accomplish that. IIRC, you can limit actions of programs to a given limited context, but I'm out of my depth.

Still, you don't need to give the root password (Linus' rant) with sudo and you'd have to maliciously use the programs you need to run. So, while in theory, your printer configuration utility could increase your privileges under sudo, I'm not aware of any such printer configuration utilities.