Use of Root

[gaf at blu.org (Jerry Feldman)]

On Tuesday 01 February 2005 10:06, Kevin D. Clark wrote:

> Unfortunately, I have never worked in an environment where the IT
> staff wasn't overworked.  Myself (and engineers like myself) tend to
> acquire root privileges, use these to do our jobs, keep our heads
> down, and try to make the IT folks jobs as easy as possible (mostly by
> never becoming a problem).
>
> I think that we agree that this is a bit of a grey area.
Unfortunately many companies don't have enough IT people. In the early days 
of the PC, departments would buy PCs and set up spreadsheets to do what 
they want because it used to take so long to get the IT people to change 
the code on the mainframe. The down side of this is that now these 
companies had important corporate data on insecure PCs, and the programming 
(eg., the spreadsheet macros) with no documentation and residing on a 
single PC. No backups, ...
IT groups then got rules so that only they could buy the PCs. 

The need here is the protection of the corporate assets -- the DATA. The 
data needs to be protected. The IT people have responsibility for the 
protection of the data under their control, and they generally do a good 
job. 

-- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Boston Linux and Unix user group
http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9
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