Linux in a Business - Got Root?

greenBeard asks: "I work for a government contractor, and have recently convinced them to purchase a Beowulf cluster, and start moving their numeric modelers from Sun to Linux. Like most historically UNIX shops, they don't allow users even low-level SUDO access, to do silly things like change file permissions or ownerships, in a tracked environment. I am an ex-*NIX admin myself ,so I understand their perspective and wish to keep control over the environment, but as a user, I'm frustrated by having to frequently call the help-desk just to get a file ownership changed or a specific package installed. If you're an admin, do you allow your users basic SUDO rights like chmod, cp, mv, etc (assuming all SUDO commands are logged to a remote system)? If no, why don't you? If you allow root access to your knowledgeable users (ie developers with Linux experience), what do you do to keep them 'in line'?"

Comments

Re:Users != Root.

[Anonymous Coward]

I suggest you start reading BOFH and get prepared to have your attitude adjusted someday.

Yes you could, you are just a moron.

[Some Random Username]

You most certainly do not need any sort of write access to /bin. Install stuff in ~/bin and set your PATH appropriately. Upgrading compilers? You do not need to mess with the system at all, just install as many compilers as you want in your home dir and use whichever one you need when you need it. And you shouldn't be setting the date, that's what ntpd is for.