From owner-freebsd-chat Mon Jan 7 21:17:46 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Received: from mail.thpoon.com (CPE0080c8f2c614.cpe.net.cable.rogers.com [24.42.106.79]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id E53A837B419 for ; Mon, 7 Jan 2002 21:17:35 -0800 (PST) Received: (qmail 82409 invoked from network); 8 Jan 2002 05:17:34 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO tea.thpoon.com) (qmailr@192.168.1.2) by 192.168.1.1 with SMTP; 8 Jan 2002 05:17:34 -0000 Received: (qmail 3684 invoked by uid 1000); 8 Jan 2002 05:17:31 -0000 To: chat@freebsd.org Subject: Multiple root accounts From: Arcady Genkin X-Face: 0=A/O5-+sE[Tf%X>rYr?Y5LD4,:^'jaJ!4jC&UR*ZrrK2>^`g22Qeb]!:d;}2YJ|Hq"LHdF OX`jWX|AT-WVFQ(TPhFVak)0nt$aEdlOq=1~D,:\z5QlVOrZ2(H,mKg=Xr|'VlHA="r Date: Tue, 08 Jan 2002 00:17:31 -0500 Message-ID: <87zo3p776c.fsf@tea.thpoon.com> Lines: 31 User-Agent: Gnus/5.090004 (Oort Gnus v0.04) XEmacs/21.4 (Common Lisp, i686-pc-linux) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Sender: owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.org What is the better scenario for a situation with multiple sysadmins for one system: a. all admins share one root account and pass b. there is a separate root account per each admin, with its own pass Historically, at my ork place there are five admins sharing the same root account. I think that scenario (b) is better, but maybe there are gotchas with this approach. Here's what I can think of with regards to having one UID 0 account per each admin: Pros: - each admin can have his own customization (dot files etc.) - possibly, accountability is increased - each admin can choose a password that's easy to remember for him - no need to communicate a new password, like it would have to be communicated if one root account were shared Cons: - there is a chance that some admin would choose a weak root password - anything else?.. What am I missing? It would be nice to hear how others approach this problem. FWIW, the network consists of almost equal shares of Solaris and Linux computers (no BSD boxes so far) with /etc/password shared over NFS. -- Arcady Genkin To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message