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Use Touch ID for Sudo on Mac

davidwalsh.name

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Re: Use Touch ID for Sudo on Mac

#171

Post by wizzwizz4 »

jeffbee wrote: post #122
derefr wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because, like ChromeOS/CoreOS, modern macOS now does image-based updates. A macOS update isn’t “whatever was previously on your OS volume, plus arbitrary patch X”; rather it’s “a new, fresh OS disk image, written to a separate APFS volume, with a fixed SHA, with update transfer-size optimized by composing said image partially from files in your current OS, but only in such a way that the volume will still hash the sa…

The thing that doesn't make sense here is that macOS discards randomly your settings, but it is also the only OS I use that regularly gets in a fucked up state where settings have to be nuked. I mean, here we are in year 37 of the mac and people are still zapping their PRAMs. The only improvement is you don't have to physically pull out the battery.

> but it is also the only OS I use that regularly gets in a fucked up state where settings have to be nuked.

Windows gets into this state fairly quickly, too, but the failures are less dramatic so we just live with it.

At least with Debian, it only happens when I deliberately change stuff! Though the `xorg-server-video-intel` driver breaks features of post-2007 Intel cards, and it's installed by default, so… perhaps it isn't the perfect OS either.

Re: Use Touch ID for Sudo on Mac

#172

Post by wizzwizz4 »

orf wrote: post #167
samstave wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever been FORCED to upgrade/update against your will for a new release whereby you say NO NO NO - then you make the mistake of falling asleep with your phone plugged into the charger to wake to a forced update to your device? Yeah - fuck apple - and fuck Jonny Ive - they claim to be the masers of all aspects of designs, but really they're they masters of /r/assholedesign Their hardware is in the top 70th % -…

That’s a lot of anger and words over something that, in the grand scheme of things, is so utterly unimportant and almost contemptuously irrelevant. Things are always a trade-off. There are big positives to keeping the ecosystem on a consistent, new and secure version of iOS. Similar positives apply to MacOS.

Maybe the first point or four. The subsequent ones? They actually seem pretty serious.

Re: Use Touch ID for Sudo on Mac

#174

Post by unilynx »

samstave wrote: post #135
Demigod33 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if one file was written by a malicious program?

You know =what would be cool: If all apps had to register their pref config files into a single dir and that would be tracked and snapshotted - and then you could just have ALL apps look to the same dir for where their configs come from and you could have a single repo for ALL apps on your or ANY system - and then you could walk up to a terminal and plug in your "license key" which said what apps you had access to an…

This was basically the idea behind the Windows registry - a single configuration store. With mostly the same tree structure on Machine and User level, so your local prefs could override machine-level prefs. The 'user' part was portable between machines on a domain. And you have a single API to access or change settings

Opinions may differ on how well it was executed in practice. I'm not sure /etc/ with its hundreds of different file formats and Ansible or Chefs as an 'API' is that much better

Re: Use Touch ID for Sudo on Mac

#175

Post by nikisweeting »

zuppy wrote: post #70

Does anybody know if there's a solution for keychain password copy too? I have a very complicated vpn password that I change often (so I don't remember it), but each day, when connecting to the vpn, I have to open keychain and type my user password to get the vpn password. I couldn't find a way to use touch id for that.

You can use your power button as a shortcut to autofill it from 1password or another password manager:

https://docs.sweeting.me/s/power-button-password-manager-sho...

Re: Use Touch ID for Sudo on Mac

#177

Post by samstave »

Demigod33 wrote: post #161
samstave wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know =what would be cool: If all apps had to register their pref config files into a single dir and that would be tracked and snapshotted - and then you could just have ALL apps look to the same dir for where their configs come from and you could have a single repo for ALL apps on your or ANY system - and then you could walk up to a terminal and plug in your "license key" which said what apps you had access to an…

> they said it was impossible What reasons did they name?

OK, disclaimer - I am going on over a decade since this happened:

There was a phone that came out (nokia??) that had a docking station and you could have a screen on it and a keyboard attachement etc...

I presented this in ~2004-ish as a white paper... (lost to hundreds of machines since, and poor data mgmt over time)

I met with a few engineers friends from google over this idea and they said they didnt think it was possible (which at the time it was not - even though I wrote about it in 2001) - and then there was that phone that came out which allowed you to have a phone docking station and use it as your primary computer.

This was at the same time whilst I was talking to my buddies at Intel about stacked procs - and they were doing 64 cores in ~2004 in test dies... and they worked.

It was in 1998 when I was at Intel that I asked "Why cant we just stack multiple CPUs on top of eachother?" and was laughed at...

I sat right next to Andy Grove, but I only spent all my time in the DRG Game lab testing games on AMD and Celeron procs to get subjective results on game perf.

Anyway... I posed a lot of things that were laughed at, which then became reality later.

I worked with a MIPS proc eng about Slot-Rack-Servers, in 1995 - this was deemed impossible... later we have HPE based systems... His name was Kent... he was one of the chief MIPS designers...

I was saying "lets make 'slots' that we can install a switch, a server, storage or whatever on the backplane..."

Yes - I am not lying - these were just things I imagined in the early-mid-late 90s....

I had a good career - but I cannot take any credit for these taking production due to I didnt ever implement any of these ideas... aside from expressing them earlier than others who were far more capable of executing.

Its just like IFTT - I literally whiteboarded IFTT for a bunch of engineers from Lockheed a few years before that existed... They have built a lot of what you interact daily with (netflix) among others...

My soul flaw - is that I think of something early, I have no ability to bring it to fruition and even though I have exceptional famous engineers as friends, I cant bring my ideas to market...

and then a few years later - things I designed hit the zeitgeist and hit market...

I have, as a consultant, made people MANY billions of dollars - and havent received anything in return.

Re: Use Touch ID for Sudo on Mac

#178

Post by jwiley »

derefr wrote: post #106
jeffbee wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a very macOS problem. Why does it reset every preference on updates? The one that kills me is wake-on-lan, that gets turned back on regardless. Hate!

Because, like ChromeOS/CoreOS, modern macOS now does image-based updates. A macOS update isn’t “whatever was previously on your OS volume, plus arbitrary patch X”; rather it’s “a new, fresh OS disk image, written to a separate APFS volume, with a fixed SHA, with update transfer-size optimized by composing said image partially from files in your current OS, but only in such a way that the volume will still hash the sa…

This is great info I've never seen referenced elsewhere. It would be awesome if you would write a blog post explaining this in more detail!

Re: Use Touch ID for Sudo on Mac

#179

Post by amrrs »

cprecioso wrote: post #56

This is amazing -- but every. single. update. disables it again Why does the sudo file not persist between updates? This case is quite minor for personal computers, but what about companies that log in with yubikeys or smart cards? Do they have to reconfigure after every update too?

Did this work on iTerm?

Re: Use Touch ID for Sudo on Mac

#180

Post by ethanpil »

beyondcompute wrote: post #63
cprecioso wrote: post #56

This is amazing -- but every. single. update. disables it again Why does the sudo file not persist between updates? This case is quite minor for personal computers, but what about companies that log in with yubikeys or smart cards? Do they have to reconfigure after every update too?

I’ve just added this to my .bash_profile: enable-sudo-touchid() { sudo sed -i -e '1s;^;auth sufficient pam_tid.so\n;' /etc/pam.d/sudo } But probably automating the check (if the automated checker has the correct permission) would not be that hard.

Why not run a launchd script on boot that does the update? Does it need to be in the .bashrc?
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