best practices for administration

Joel rees at ddcom.co.jp
Thu May 12 01:00:17 PDT 2005


> The nexus of my query lies in my attempt to have our central IT folks
> issue additional identities for users to have when administering the
> systems versus doing productivity work on them. I'd like to understand
> what is done generally when granting users permissions to do things on
> the operating system that imply 'administration', ie installing
> software, adding printers, modifying system scripts, etc. There are
> some here who think that putting standard user ID's into
> administrative 'groups' is sufficient for granting such priveledges.

Users will always resist anything that will cause them to type in
another password to get their job done.

Probably you want to mix approaches a bit. 

Certain tasks will warrant a separate login, in part to sandbag against
trojans and other malware. If you do set up such accounts, make sure
browsing-type accounts are not allowed to sudo to admin-type accounts,
and establish a policy of not using su from the browsing accounts.
(Helps keep any keyloggers from getting at abuseable passwords.) I'd
even suggest not allowing login from the browsing accounts, but I
haven't yet figured out how to effectively

    sudo -u joe2 webbrowser .

Heh.

One difficulty is getting users into the habit of knowning when to share
files with themselves.

--
Joel Rees   <rees at ddcom.co.jp>
digitcom, inc.   株式会社デジコム
Kobe, Japan   +81-78-672-8800
** <http://www.ddcom.co.jp> **



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