What is difference between pbrun and sudo command?

Question

What is difference between pbrun and sudo command?
I have seen people executing pbrun sudo su - what this means? I know su -, it will try to switch to root user.
What speciality pbrun gives to sudo when it is used along with sudo command?

Answer 1

Symark Power Broker is a commercial package. Sudo is an open source tool. The following text is from the "Summary" section of the "SANS Institute Reading Room" document "PowerBroker vs. Sudo", sponsored by "Symark":

PowerBroker is a full-featured solution with a rich suite of security options. Because of these features, PowerBroker can be much more complicated to set up if all the security options are used. In a strict comparison with sudo however; using only the features available to sudo, the installation and maintenance is no more complicated.

Sudo can be an effective solution for organizations where the primary need is to restrict access for cooperative users and to avoid errors. If there is a need for a system that will provide an audit trail and solidly enforce security policy such as is required by HIPAA, SOX, etc. to prove regulatory compliance, PowerBroker has the built-in tools to handle that task.

PowerBroker is issued on a per node license which can become costly for a large scale corporation. The cost is one reason some companies may not uniformly deploy PowerBroker and may instead use it as a point solution for mission critical or sensitive data systems.

Answer 2

pbrun is part of powerbroker server that symark and sun teams provides for advanced root privilege delegation and keylogging. This application provides delegate privileges (usually root) to other users and log all events related all audits with advanced features and centralized all its. Also you can apply security policy your servers that is powerbroker agent.so pbrun makes everything via central (powerbroker) master host server.. You want to run chown or su command with pbrun on your host , pbrun sends to pb agent on master server and then master server receives this request and processes this to according to policy files on the master server.if request is ok then master server returns "accept command information" to agent and pb agent run your command. And you can run sudo on solaris with your host also for run command as admin(root) or another user.

Answer 3

Pbrun: Terminal is secured and it is a product of SUN.
sudo: User is secured instead of terminal and it is a product of Solaris.