I wouldn't phrase it that way if I were you. Some people (insert here
some user whose login starts and ends in 's' :) can think of a lot of
ways to have a good time on a machine like ftoomsh involving breaking
any rules progsoc may have. You are implying that sysadmins should not
only condone such activities, but actually SUPPORT them. Surely this
isn't what you meant.
I believe it is possible for a sysadmin to enforce rules without being
Fascist (call me an idealist :). Basically it involves acting like a
Fascist sysadmin except for the following things:
* Give a user a number of warnings (depending on the severity of
the act) when you catch them doing something naughty before
being Fascist and locking their account, rather than locking it
first and having the user come crawling.
* Being more passive in enforcing rules than what a Fascist
sysadmin be: for example, scanning publically-readable files for
'improper material' rather than reading/looking at people's
private files. The latter sounds evil but sysadmins are well
within their rights to do so under the banner of "reasonable
suspicion of breaking rules".
There are sure to be more things, but you can get the general idea.
As you can see, being an ideologically-sound system administrator is
nowhere near as fun as being a Fascist one, which explains why there are
so few of them around.
I know all this is only me being pedantic, but I just wanted to make
things clear.
>
> Due to the "too many cooks spoil the broth and leave lots of holes" the
> number of active sysadmins will probably number around 5, minus 1 or 2. I
5 is a lot for 1 machine, but I suppose we need that many seeing none of
them will be working on ftoomsh full-time. May I suggest not giving
them all the root password, and instead allow them to use some
su-root-but-type-your-own-password-instead program like they have in
SoCS. This makes it easier to tell different roots... err admins apart
when they're logged in. Have only the Computer Systems Officer have the
root password, with the console bootable to single-user mode in case
s/he gets run over by a large road vehicle.
-- Dennis Clark | Email: dlclark@nospam.socs.uts.edu.au School of Computing Sciences | University of Technology, Sydney | Phone: +61 2 817 2310