Create sysadmin-notes.md

sysadmin-notes.md

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+## Root Privileges and Automated Tasks
+
+As a sysadmin, you will likely find yourself in a situation,
+where it would be useful to delegate root level privileges to
+non-root users. There could be any number of reasons to do this,
+lets say that you are working closely with a group of developers,
+and they need access to restart httpd each time a code deployment
+is pushed out.
+
+Giving the group root access would be overkill since all they
+need to do it restart httpd. Luckily this is a well understood
+requirement and the sudo command was built with this in mind. The
+sudo command allows a permitted user, or group of users, to execute
+superuser command as defined by a configuration file. What is so
+great about sudo, is that you can define very narrow root access
+with the added bonus that there is built in logging.
+
+```sh
+# helpdesk ticket #1234
+# aid software deployment for dev group
+deployment        ALL=(root) NOPASSWD: /etc/init.d/httpd start
+deployment        ALL=(root) NOPASSWD: /etc/init.d/httpd stop
+deployment        ALL=(root) NOPASSWD: /etc/init.d/httpd restart
+```
+
+Depending on your distro, you might have a directory called
+`/etc/sudoers.d/` where you can package up your custom `sudoers`
+line into nice little files. This can be handy if you have a large
+`sudoers` file and want to break it apart into smaller manageable
+chunks.
+
+Reference: http://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/23-root-privileges-and-automated-tasks