Edit sudoers to allow /sbin/ifconfig down with NOPASSWD

Question

I'm trying to edit /etc/sudoers so that I can execute a bash script with a root password.

so far every edit I've tried to sudoers is not working.

I've tried adding each of these lines:

%admin    ALL= NOPASSWD: /sbin/ifconfig

%admin    ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: /sbin/ifconfig

%users    ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: /sbin/ifconfig

"myusername"  ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: /sbin/ifconfig

Each time I am able to save and quit out of visudo without any warning about syntax errors. But then when I try to execute the ifconfig command from my admin account, it still says 'permission denied'

ifconfig en0 down
ifconfig: down: permission denied 

Can someone please tell me what is going wrong? thanx

Answer 1

You have to prefix your command submission with 'sudo'. In your case, the command would be:

 sudo ifconfig en0 down

Also, with your config you are allowing ANY ifconfig command line parameters to be used. The correct and much more restrictive sudoers entry is:

 %admin     ALL=(root) NOPASSWD: /sbin/ifconfig en0 down

Please do read the man pages on sudo and look at the various good sources of sudo information out there via google.