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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'?"
You are going to get a bunch of responses. most of them from people that will say something like.. "NO." "NOBODY GETS ROOT, PERIOD".
Well, in an ideal world, it would be that way. We would setup systems for people to use and they could just use them without root privledge. Unfortunatley we know that isn't possible if you want your users to actually be productive and get things done.
I work for a large software company. Trust me you'd know the name of it if I could tell you. We use linux on the desktop, as well as the servers. We also have some Microsoft servers that are either for legacy purposes (havent been updated yet) or for testing applications against MS environments. Anyway...
All my users have laptops with Linux on it. They all have the root password to their individual laptops. Many of the also have a server at their desk for their own testing purposes. They have root to that.
However, the "real" servers that are accessed by someone that isn't themselves, the users do not get the root password, ever.
I look at it this way. If you bomb your laptop or your test server, either you can fix it, or you can call me and I'll walk you through fixing it, fix it, or just give you a new clean configuration.
If you bomb my server, I'm going to make sure you never have access to anything, ever.
Don't Tread on Me
There are some interesting 'privledge escalation' things that can happen on machines 'owned' by the user on a big network, though.
The one I experienced firsthand was a Windows NT machine that was my desktop that I ('naturally') had full admin access to. This was a machine on a large corporate network that was very diverse (there were Solaris, OS/2 Warp, Netware, and Windows NT servers on the network). I discovered, quite by accident actually, that if I ran the POSIX Interix (now SFU) shell on my NT workstation (something the company had bought for me, and I had installed myself,) that I could create any account I wanted on my local machine, and it would allow me, using that account name, to access shares on the network, doing whatever I wanted to files my username 'owned'. I am talking about the network that a company that makes implantable medical devices kept their work on. I suspect the 'defect' had something to do with NIS and 'travelling profiles' in Solaris, and the security system not being equipped to deal with other Unix-like hosts on the network that weren't secured. Incidentally, I didn't discover the problem by 'poking around where I wasn't supposed to be,' I simply noticed I was suddenly able to do things to files I normally had access to without entering my UNIX password as required in the past. Something clicked in my head, so I created a local account on the NT box that matched an important person's UID on the Unix system... yep, I had all his permissions.
Delete test account. Never touch again. Too scared to mention it to anybody. It's been enough years now that I can even mention it in public. I hope they've secured things a bit better now, because these days there are unsecured Unixy systems all over the place.
resigned
Man, I wish I hadn't posted in this thread, so I could moderate your comment.
You are the only poster so far who seems to have any understanding... Or at least the only one that doesn't let their understanding get clouded by their childish desire to "have root" even if they don't really need it.
With root access comes responsibility... and I don't mean that like the way they use it in a Spider Man comic book. It's not that you need to exercise caution, ethics, and good judgement lest you become evil; If you have root and something goes wrong, you are responsible. Even if you weren't the one that broke it. Root is a blame magnet. Period. End of story. Unless they're paying you the sysadmin's salary too, you should not want to have root access on any shared system.
Also, people who can't grasp the concept that sudo access to chmod is exactly the same thing as complete root access should have their *nix geek license revoked.
Unless you need to set the clock, signal a process you don't own, or listen on a well-known port numbered 1024 or lower (if it's not a well-known port, you don't need to use a low number. I don't care how much you insist. You don't have a good reason. I'm not listening anymore...), you do not need to be root. Yes, you can do every single other thing you need to do as a user without root. It's not even inconvienient. One must wonder how these people would have survived before PCs...