mirror of https://github.com/sudo-project/sudo.git
79 lines
3.0 KiB
Markdown
79 lines
3.0 KiB
Markdown
A Brief History of Sudo
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=======================
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## The Early Years
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Sudo was first conceived and implemented by Bob Coggeshall and Cliff Spencer
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around 1980 at the Department of Computer Science at SUNY/Buffalo. It ran on
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a VAX-11/750 running 4.1BSD. An updated version, credited to Phil Betchel,
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Cliff Spencer, Gretchen Phillips, John LoVerso, and Don Gworek, was posted to
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the net.sources Usenet newsgroup in December of 1985.
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## Sudo at CU-Boulder
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In the Summer of 1986, Garth Snyder released an enhanced version of sudo.
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For the next 5 years, sudo was fed and watered by a handful of folks at
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CU-Boulder, including Bob Coggeshall, Bob Manchek, and Trent Hein.
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## Root Group Sudo
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In 1991, Dave Hieb and Jeff Nieusma wrote a new version of sudo with an
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enhanced sudoers format under contract to a consulting firm called "The Root
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Group". This version was later released under the GNU public license.
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## CU Sudo
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In 1994, after maintaining sudo informally within CU-Boulder for some time,
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Todd C. Miller made a public release of "CU sudo" (version 1.3) with bug
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fixes and support for more operating systems. The "CU" was added to
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differentiate it from the "official" version from "The Root Group".
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In 1995, a new parser for the sudoers file was contributed by Chris Jepeway.
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The new parser was a proper grammar (unlike the old one) and could work with
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both sudo and visudo (previously they had slightly different parsers).
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In 1996, Todd, who had been maintaining sudo for several years in his spare
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time, moved distribution of sudo from a CU-Boulder ftp site to his domain,
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courtesan.com.
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## Just Plain Sudo
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In 1999, the "CU" prefix was dropped from the name since there had been no
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formal release of sudo from "The Root Group" since 1991 (the original
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authors now work elsewhere). As of version 1.6, Sudo no longer contains any
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of the original "Root Group" code and is available under an ISC-style
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license.
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In 2001, the sudo web site, ftp site, and mailing lists were moved from
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courtesan.com to the sudo.ws domain (sudo.org was already taken).
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## LDAP Integration
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In 2003, Nationwide Mutual Insurance Company contributed code written by
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Aaron Spangler to store the sudoers data in LDAP. These changes were
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incorporated into Sudo 1.6.8.
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## New Parser
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In 2005, Todd rewrote the sudoers parser to better support the features that
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had been added in the past ten years. This new parser removes some
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limitations of the previous one, removes ordering constraints and adds
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support for including multiple sudoers files.
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## Quest Sponsorship
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In 2010, Quest Software began sponsoring Sudo development by hiring
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Todd to work on Sudo as part of his full-time job. This enabled
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the addition of I/O logging, the plugin API, the log server,
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additional regression and fuzz tests, support for binary packages
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and more regular releases. Quest's sponsorship of Sudo ended in
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February of 2024.
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## Present Day
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Sudo, in its current form, is maintained by:
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Todd C. Miller <Todd.Miller@sudo.ws>
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Todd continues to enhance sudo and fix bugs.
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