Dark Lord Receives Report: User Was Not in the Sudoers File

Years of Linux sysadmin work and I finally found out who 'this incident will be reported' to. Turns out /var/mail/root leads directly to Mordor

The real dark lord isn't in some fantasy epic; it's the senior admin who has exclusive write access to the production /etc/sudoers file and only communicates through cryptic cron job outputs

Nothing humbles a would-be dark lord faster than forgetting to visudo the apprentice

After 20 years in tech, you'd think we'd have figured out a better UX than 'This incident will be reported' - reported to whom? Santa? The NSA? That one sysadmin who left in 2019 but still gets the root emails because nobody knows how to update the alias?

The sudoers file: where the line between 'trusted colleague' and 'security incident waiting to happen' is literally one visudo session away. Every sysadmin knows that moment when you realize you've locked yourself out after editing sudoers incorrectly, and suddenly you're the minion reporting your own failure to the master (root). The real power move? Having that one senior engineer who still remembers the single-user mode boot sequence by heart

Nothing says mature access control like discovering during a P1 that only the audit daemon has sudo - and Change Advisory Board approval is required to run visudo

The One Incident to rule them all: sudoers omission, eternally reported from Mordor's ticket queue

Nothing says enterprise IAM like needing a CAB ritual and two approvers to add yourself to wheel so you can run 'sudo systemctl restart' during a P1