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In WinSCP, I want to be able to have sudo access. In WinSCP, Advanced > SFTP > SFTP Server: sudo su -c /usr/lib/openssh/sftp-server

In Ubuntu 22.04.1:

echo "user1 ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL" | sudo tee "/etc/sudoers.d/user1-user"

I successfully have sudo access in WinSCP.

But I don't want to permit no password for everything. Just sftp-server. So I changed ALL to /usr/lib/openssh/sftp-server:

user1 ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: /usr/lib/openssh/sftp-server

In WinSCP, I get the error:

Cannot initialize SFTP protocol. Is the host running an SFTP server?

Why? Is this a problem with my syntax in Ubuntu? Or a problem with WinSCP or my settings within WinSCP?

sftp-server is found in /usr/lib/openssh/

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  • Try user1 ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/su -c /usr/lib/openssh/sftp-server
    – pasman pasmański
    Nov 30, 2022 at 20:08
  • pasman pasmański, it worked. Thank you!
    – threehappypenguins
    Nov 30, 2022 at 21:49

1 Answer 1

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I had previously tried user1 ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: su -c /usr/lib/openssh/sftp-server but it didn't work. Of course it didn't work. I forgot that I need the full path for su which is /usr/bin/su. Thanks pasman pasmański!

The correct way of restricting passwordless sudo for sftp is the following:

user1 ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/su -c /usr/lib/openssh/sftp-server
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