[ale] Philosophical question

Ronald Chmara ron at Opus1.COM
Wed Feb 11 19:00:12 EST 2004


On Feb 11, 2004, at 6:40 PM, Greg Freemyer wrote:
> On Tue, 2004-02-10 at 09:36, Jerald Sheets wrote:
>> Hey folks.
>>
>> Philosophical question for you...
>>
>> If you were offered 40% more a year to do the work of an applications
>> admin (i.e. no root access), would you take it?
>>
>> i told a recruiter that money wasn't really important in the relo I'm
>> trying to accomplish and then he came back with a high enough number i
>> can't ignore him.
>>
>> so that's the question, would *you* give up root access for a pile of
>> cash?
> It seems to be the way of the future for big companies.
>
> One of the guys who works for my company is permanently at a large
> customer doing application/OS support.  He will be losing
> root/administrator access to all servers in the data center (DC).
>
> Instead trouble tickets and "shadow" sessions will be used anytime he
> needs to do root level activities.  And the sessions have to be very
> short because they are hard to come by.
>
> The bad part is that the IT staff is really not that knowledgable, so 
> he
> will now have to have a test machine in the lab to work out all his
> admin procedures on.

I think that this is really the bigger question... not if one has root, 
but the abilities of those who do have root access, and those who 
don't. Being of the anti-root persuasion, I don't think that anybody 
*should* have root, unless they're physically at console (yes, you 
*can* do just about anything but add hardware without root).

Of course, if one doesn't have the ability to reasonably do their job 
without having root access, that's a problem, but almost all sysad, 
programming, dba, (etc. etc.) tasks simply don't require it. sudo will 
suffice for the very rare tool/program that is needed (in most cases).

-Bop



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