I needed to add some sudo access rights for support personnel on about a hundred Centos 6.6 servers. Currently no one one these hosts had sudo rights, so the /etc/sudoers file was the default file. I’m using Ansible to maintain these hosts, but rather than modify the default /etc/sudoers file using Ansible’s lineinfile: command, I decided to create a support.conf file and use Ansible’s copy: command to copy that file into /etc/sudoers.d/. That way if a future version of Centos changes the /etc/sudoers file I’m leaving that file untouched, so my changes should always work.

  - name: Add custom sudoers
    copy: src=files/support.conf dest=/etc/sudoers.d/support.conf owner=root group=root mode=0440 validate='visudo -cf %s'

The support.conf file I created copied over just fine, and the validation step of running “visudo -cf” on the file before moving it into place claimed that the file was error-free and should work just fine as a sudoers file.

I logged in as the support user and it didn’t work:

[support@c1n1 ~]$ sudo /bin/ls /var/log/*
support is not in the sudoers file.  This incident will be reported.

Not only did it not work, it was telling me that the support user wasn’t even in the file, which they clearly were.

After Googling around a bit and not finding much I saw this in the Sudoers Manual:

sudo will read each file in /etc/sudoers.d, skipping file names that end in ‘~’ or contain a ‘.’ character to avoid causing problems with package manager or editor temporary/backup files.

sudo was skipping the file because the file name contained a period!

I changed the name of the file from support.conf to support and it worked.

  - name: Add custom sudoers
    copy: src=files/support dest=/etc/sudoers.d/support owner=root group=root mode=0440 validate='visudo -cf %s'

Hope you find this useful.

Here’s a snippet from /etc/sudoers.d/support if you’re interested. The “support” user has already been created by a separate Ansible command.

# Networking
Cmnd_Alias NETWORKING = /sbin/route, /sbin/ifconfig, /bin/ping, /sbin/dhclient, /usr/bin/net, /sbin/iptables, /usr/bin/rfcomm, /usr/bin/wvdial, /sbin/iwconfig, /sbin/mii-tool

# Installation and management of software
Cmnd_Alias SOFTWARE = /bin/rpm, /usr/bin/up2date, /usr/bin/yum

# Services
Cmnd_Alias SERVICES = /sbin/service, /sbin/chkconfig

# Reading logs
Cmnd_Alias READ_LOGS = /usr/bin/less /var/log/*, /bin/more /var/log/*, /bin/ls /var/log/*, /bin/ls /var/log

support  ALL = NETWORKING, SOFTWARE, SERVICES, READ_LOGS