Slashdot Mirror
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'?"
>I am a developer of multiplayer servers. For my part, I couldn't do my job without root access.
If you are a developer, you don't need root access. All the examples you've given are the system admin job (system administration?)
>Don't make blanket policies unless you're prepared to make exceptions.
Its not really a blanket policy if there are exceptions.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.