Sudo and Solaris Privileges

Sudo on Solaris 10 and Solaris 11 allow to specify a privilege set a command will run with. This is very powerful if you want to be more specific in granting only required privileges for a given command, instead of allowing a command to run as root. Although Solaris has additional/different means to achieve the same, which in some cases is better than sudo, but the latter is what most users are familiar with.

For example, the 'fmadm faulty' command requires sys_admin privilege to run.

milek    ALL=()PRIVS="basic,sys_admin" NOPASSWD:/usr/sbin/fmadm faulty

This means that user milek can now run: sudo fmadm faulty
and the command will now work, but it won't run as root - it will execute as user milek with privileges set to basic,sys_admin, which is more secure than allowing the command to run as root.