Saved by the qemu_guest_agent

Literally an hour after I wrote the post about installing the qemu guest agent in a VM and explaining how it can be used to inject root level commands into a VM, I had use of it due to a mistake.

I’d decided to add myself to the sudoers file. Since the last line in that file is a directive to include all the files in the /etc/sudoers.d directory, the accepted way to do that for local changes is to create a file in that directory with the necessary commands.

sudo Incident Reports - where do they go?

Even though it’s my server, I still have a pang of guilt when this happens.

I always imagine Richard Stallman (or someone with a similar 2000’s database administrator beard) looking at me disappointedly and shaking his head slowly.

It does raise the question though - since it’s my server, shouldn’t I be getting a text message from CERN or something?

Where is this report?

(Relevant xkcd )

Like everything, the answer is ‘it’s logged’. We can use the journalctl command to look at the logs, on this server that’s been running less than 20 hours, there’s already several thousand lines to look through if you just enter journalctl, so I’m going to just send all the high priority logs to a file: