At home, I have a Raspberry Pi that I use to develop my ROV and K-9 software. Raspbian seems to have passwordless sudo, meaning you don’t have to enter the user’s password to run a command as root. I share this development machine with my wife, Tamarisk.
In the interest of getting some more of the code written, at the expense of having a development machine available for some of the work while I am not at home, I have installed Ubuntu Server on a VirtualBox Virtual machine.
The default setup is that to run a command as ‘sudo’, you need to enter a password. To have passwordless authentication, I will need to make some configuration changes.
Use the following command to edit the /etc/sudoers file. Ubuntu opens the sudoers file in nano.
sudo visudo
My username is ‘pi’, so I added the following line to the bottom of the open file, then saved and exited (CTRL+X).
pi ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:ALL
Rebooting the machine applies the changes:
Why use visudo for editing sudoer file?
Usually, I would edit /etc/sudoers manually in a text editor like Nano; however, I have learned that this is not advised, as the risk of making errors that prevent me from logging into the machine is relatively high. The visudo tool creates a temporary file where you can edit the sudoers file using the default text editor. When you try to save your changes, it runs a syntax check and notifies you if there are any syntax errors.
