Ubuntu server 12.04 on AWS - How does the passwordless sudo work for the ubuntu user?

Posted by aychedee on Ask Ubuntu See other posts from Ask Ubuntu or by aychedee
Published on 2012-09-23T09:30:23Z Indexed on 2012/09/23 9:48 UTC
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12.04

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sudo

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aws

I'm using Ubuntu server 12.04 on Amazon. I want to add a new user that has the same behaviour as the default ubuntu user. Specifically I want passwordless sudo for this new user.

So I've added a new user and went to edit /etc/sudoers (using visudo of course). From reading that file it seemed like the default ubuntu user was getting it's passwordless sudo from being a member of the admin group. So I added my new user to that. Which didn't work. Then I tried adding the NOPASSWD directive to sudoers. Which also didn't work.

Anyway, now I'm just curious. How does the ubuntu user get passwordless privileges if they aren't defined in /etc/sudoers. What is the mechanism that allows this?

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