North American Network Operators Group
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Re: Security Practices question

  • From: Valdis.Kletnieks
  • Date: Thu Oct 03 12:29:56 2002 
On Wed, 02 Oct 2002 17:48:16 PDT, just me said:
> In an situation where the team needs root; all per-admin UID 0
> accounts add is accountability and personalized shells/environments.

Accountability is always good, but you can do even better with sudo (Sorry,
I couldn't resist).

As far as personalized shells/environments go, I've found that this helps
a lot:

export ENV=~/.kshrc   (for ksh-based systems)
export BASH_ENV=~/.bashrc (for bash-based boxes)
su -m    (or whatever "save the environment" parameter your su has)

and voila, you have your preferred environment.

Bottom line - per-admin UID 0 doesn't give you anything you couldn't get
via other means.

(And please, no flames about using su rather than sudo, or the wisdom of
using su and preserving the environment - I've already done the analysis
and decided it's correct *for the machines in question*.)
-- 
				Valdis Kletnieks
				Computer Systems Senior Engineer
				Virginia Tech

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