Trying to elevate rsync privileges when connecting over ssh without using NOPASSWD in sudoers

[Richard Hector]

On 12/03/22 06:06, Dr. Mark Asbach via rsync wrote:
> Hi Dan,
> 
>> Why not rsync directly as root?  Then you can use a passwordless, passphraseless RSA (or similar) keypair.

I'm not saying I agree with this, but ...

> That’s because these are cloud instances that get maintained by multiple admins. If we require all of them to log in as root, we would have to share the root password

Not if you use ssh keys - just put each admin's public key in root's 
authorized_keys file.

  – and that would on one hand be a security/maintainability issue (if 
one person leaves the team, we’ll have to change and redistribute the 
root password),

Just delete their key.

  on the other hand it would violate accountability (log files would 
only show logins by „root“ and after an issue, there would be no chance 
to know whom to ask about strange things).

Harder, I think. I think with verbose logging, you can see the 
fingerprint of the key that was used, but that seems a bit messy.

  Both are the typical reasons for not using root accounts but going for 
sudo instead …

I tend to agree with using sudo :-)

OTOH, I have an ansible user that can sudo with no password.

And I do my backups (using dirvish) as root, using a key with a forced 
command.

Maybe that's an option? Each admin has a special key pair for this 
purpose, that allows login as root, but has a forced command on the 
server to do this rsync?

Cheers,
Richard