UNIX Systems Control Politics?

Posted by Cliff on Sunday November 21, 2004 @03:23AM from the got-root dept.

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?"

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What kind of Webmaster? by Androclese · 2004-11-21 04:26 · Score: 5, Interesting

Are you talking the modern Webmaster where their skill sets are limited to the design and content of the website or the Old-School Webmaster (like me) where you were responsible for everything like the OS, the software (Apache, mySQL, Perl, PHP), access (.htaccess, etc.), and the content (HTML, images, etc.)

If you're talking a Modern webmaster, then no, they don't need it. The Server Admin just has to make sure all the directories they are using are owned by the assigned user.

If you're talking Old-School, then yeah, it's pretty much a necessity; sudo at a minimum.