UNIX Systems Control Politics?

pariahdecss asks: "I have just been hired as the webmaster for local college. The website for which I am responsible is hosted 'in-house' and controlled by the college. The server box does not have any other production systems on it besides my website. The website that I have inherited is driven by an amalgam of Embedded Perl and PostgreSQL. Now to the politics...the UNIX Administrator does not want to give me root access to this box. What have others done when faced with this type of systems politics? Is it even possible to function as a full scale webmaster without root access to the box you serve from?"

Comments

Yes

[metalhed77]

It's entirely possible to function without root. Albeit to a limited extent. You have to ask your admin to install / upgrade software for you, but do it enough and maybe he'll get sick of it and give you root. Next?

No

[cookiepus]

You're the one trying to do politics. Your domain as webmaster is html files, scripts, etc. You don't need to have root pass to upload files. Everyone who uses someone else's system for hosting is a webmaster w/o root access to the server. The two things are unrelated.

As your sysop to do things whenever you don't have access to do something (set up a db?) If this happens often enough he'll reconsider the policy, but most likely you will be just fine w. the privileges you have.

You just need 2 environments

[Gothmolly]

Test, and Production. Build a linux box, give yourself root, do all your play work there. When its time to make real changes, in 1 shot, ask the SA to do whatever you need (upgrade PHP to version foo, edit config file bar, etc). They're more likely to do it if you don't nickel and dime them every day for little stuff. Plus, you have the added bonus of not fscking up your main, real, this-is-your-paycheck website doing test work.

Not Everything Requires Root

[thenerdgod]

You should only need root-style access to do one thing, and that's restart apache. And if your sysadmin uses, say, iptables/ipfilter, he could just redirect port 80 to some port above 1024 and then you wouldn't even need root at all! Quit whining!

"But Wait!" you say, "What about software upgrades? New Perl modules?" --Sorry, bub, installing and upgrading software is exactly what the sysadmin is there for. These are her systems. Not yours.

It's likely your sysadmin is smarter than you, and has been doing this longer. And while I'm sure you have "teh lunix" at home and run X as root "all the time", that doesn't make you worthy of having root on the universitie's box. Quite frankly, having been through this from the sysadmin's side, No, you don't need root, and it's YOU who's playing the political game, not them. It's their box, their system, their software. The limousine company owns the cadillac, you just drive it around and make sure it has gas. Thank you. Move along!

Your answer

[Safety Cap]

"~ the UNIX Administrator does not want to give me root access ~. ~ Is it even possible to function as a full scale webmaster without root access to the box ~?"

This article advocates a

( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based (x) vigilante

approach to website administration. Your idea will not work. Here is why it
won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea,
and it may have other flaws which used to vary from organization to
organization before a poorly thought-out, ineffective approach is suggested.)

(x) Sudo will allow you to do what you need
( ) Installing extra software on a machine without the Admin's knowledge
is bad
(x) You don't know what you're doing
( ) Hosting w4r3z and hacks on company-owned equipment is bad
( ) You are not mature enough to manage a box in a production environment
( ) Your users will not put up with it
( ) SCO will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from the Admin
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(x) Your employers cannot afford to lose services or alienate students
( ) Students don't care about your lack of web admin skills
(x) Anyone could anonymously destroy your entire site due to your
inept administration skills

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) University rules expressly prohibiting it
(x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for servers
( ) 5kr!pt k!dd!35 installing open relays
( ) Backup and restore
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
(x) Unpopularity of weird new configurations
( ) Students' reluctance to use an obviously hacked site
( ) Huge existing software investment current setup
( ) Susceptibility of poorly configured machines to attack
(x) Your willingness to install OS patches in a timely manner
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Extreme fun of web h4xx0r5
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate school administrators
(x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who think they need root
in order to do their job
( ) Bandwidth costs that will increase once the b0xx3n are pwned
( ) IE

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been
shown practical
(x) Any scheme based on 'su' is unacceptable
( ) Lack of knowledge upon how to manage a web server should not be the
subject of politics
( ) .htaccess sucks
( ) mysql sucks
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of campus networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Surfing the web should be easy
(x) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(x) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time root access is cumbersome
( ) I don't want the campus regents looking over my shoulder
( ) Web admins who have been coasting along with barely any knowledge
of what they're doing should be killed in a way is slow and painful

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
(x) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.

You don't need it

[dimss]

You can run Apache, perl and PostgeSQL without being root. Ask your admin for two things: port 80 mapping to 8080 and calling your startup.sh after boot (I do so in rc.local). And you're there.

Re:What kind of Webmaster?

[M1FCJ]

Nope, still not necessary. Apache/MySQL/perl/PHP can be compiled and installed anywhere you like and doesn't have to be owned by the root. All of these (if applicable) can use unpriviledged ports and the only thing the root has to do is use iptables/ipfwd rules to make sure it is accessible as if they are running on priviledged ports. This is applicable especially if you are old-school, you should know how to change mysql's default listening port. Any odd idiot might not know how to do this but you probably would.

As for the contents and access, they are all files on a file system. Given the right access, you don't need more.

Even more importantly, as a secure site policy, webadmins should never have root accesses, in case the webadmin's account gets hacked into, they should not even be able to see inside the system. In some scenarios a chroot jail might be the best solution. Still no need for root access. That'd be just stupidity.

Fscking Unter-grads

[Anonymous Coward]

Every year I have to hear about this bullshit.

Listen kid, we're going to tell you this now, don't forget this lesson. You are not special. You are not the brightest little ray of knowledge to ever grace the halls of your university. In fact, the odds are very much that you are aren't even good enough to be the layer of slime the illumnai pond scum will float on. There are 10,000 other eager little faces just like you. And the odds are you aren't anywhere near the top end. If you were, the faculty would be putting you to better use than being the webmaster. Any idiot can be the webmaster, quite successfully, however, giving that idiot root would endanger the system the sysadmin is charged to maintain.

To summarize:
1) You are not special
2) You are should simply be happy you beat out those not smart enough to be webwanker
3) You should put your little ego at the door and realize the sysadmin is only doing his job, if he were stupid enough to hand you root, he should be fired.
4) Webwanking is not a technical task.
5) Webwankers *SHOULD* *NEVER* *EVER* have root. It *ALWAYS* ends badly, at my university we have a policy that says just that. And many defacements have been avoided because of it
6) Grow up! The sysadmin is getting sick of hearing this bullshit year after fucking year!

Re:Fscking Unter-grads

[Farmer Jimbo]

1.) If I had mod points I wouldn't be posting this reply.

2.) I had forgotten how truly evil it can be to work with 20 year old's who think they know everything.

3.) I remeber being 20 and thinking the world was so lucky to have me. Thank god someone older and wiser stepped on me hard and made me realize I was being a snot.

Developers should have root.... on dev boxes.

[agristin]

No developer should have root on PRODUCTION boxes.

The process should be:

development happens on development box (workstation, server whatever). Developers may have root on this- if they do, they manage it, OS hardware and all. Developers will use sudo if anyone else is responsible for the server hardware and OS. This should never be exposed to untrusted networks.

QA stage: if you are poor or small, do this against the development box. If not this should be a seperate QA box. This should be managed by QA team. If the sysadmin is the same, the sysadmin should hold root, qa team may sudo, developers should not be accessing this box directly (except in emergency, then they will be sheperded by QA). This should also not be exposed to untrusted networks unless you have and excellent (and obeyed) security policy and review.

Production: only the sysadmin has root, noone else should have access. The sysadmin publishes to production- using the release that QA approves. Highest security policy applies here.

If your QA and dev team are the same, collapse development and QA- but trust me keep production seperate.

-A