How I can make sudo session an hour and not few minutes in Ubuntu 10.04?

Question

How I can make sudo Ubuntu 10.04 session an hour and not few minutes?

Now I have to write my password for sudo commands every few minutes.

Solution 1

Instead of making the sudo session longer, you could actually log in as root.

sudo su

Anything you do afterwards is done as root. You don't even have to enter sudo anymore.

You can log out any time you want.

exit

Solution 2

Disclaimer: This is not recommended for security reasons! One of the reasons why Linux is so safe are the user privileges.

You can edit the sudo settings file with the following command:

  sudo visudo

And then change the line

  Defaults      env_reset

to

  Defaults      env_reset,timestamp_timeout=x

x is in minutes by the way. A negative value for x such as -1 will cause sudo to ask for user password only once per session.

  Defaults:user      timestamp_timeout=x

will apply the setting only to the named user.

One word of warning: Do not edit this file with another editor/command! visudo will perform sanity checks before actually saving the file, making sure that you did not break it. If you lock yourself out of your system, reboot into single-user/recovery mode and run visudo there.

Solution 3

You can use pamusb.

"pam_usb provides hardware authentication for Linux using ordinary USB Flash Drives "

Comments

[Naili]

"Now i have to write my password for sudo commands every few minutes" Right. That's the point. :-)

[Jjames]

Not what he asked for, but maybe a could solution which isn't such a worst-case security scenario.

[jfmessier]

AFAIK, this is only working for the shell prompt window you currently use, not all applications on the X session you currently run. And this has an advantage. You can have your regular applications, shells and others, while keeping one shell (sudo su) with root privileges.

[AlcubierreDrive]

Much less safe than typing sudo before the few commands you want to run as root, with the convenience of not having to retype the password. See Bobby's much better answer below.

[Bradley Mountford]

This doesn't answer the question, and is more dangerous. It short-circuits sudo's behavior of logging commands entered, and it completely removes the timeout (which is good security practice, the OP was just asking how to change the tradeoff).

[m3nda]

The package name for install it is libpamusb. I used it for a while and it's perfect to reduce sudo annoyance but you have to take care to not leave usb plugged otherwise other scripts could attempt for sudo. I just use it for install sprints, some software init and nothing more, is not a good idea to use for always, sometimes the sudo su does a better job.

[Kubuntuer82]

One question: why are you recommending not to edit the file with another editor? I mean, what are the possible side effects of this action?

[Jjames]

@Kubuntuer82 visudo does sanity checks before it saves the file.

[Slartibartfast]

@Kubuntuer82 If the sudoers file has invalid syntax, all sudo commands will fail. This could break things, and if you don't have easy alternate access to root, you may be very sad.

[Kubuntuer82]

Many thanks both! I think this explanation is very important and should be part of the answer...