Security Practices question

Thu Oct 3 02:23:30 UTC 2002

 "eddy" == E B Dreger <eddy+public+spam at noc.everquick.net> writes:

jm> Date: Wed, 2 Oct 2002 17:48:16 -0700 (PDT)
jm> From: just me

jm> In an environment where every sysadmin is interchangable, and any
jm> one of them can be woken up at 3am to fix the random problem of
jm> the day, you tell me how to manage 'sudoers' on 4000 machines.

eddy> krb5/ksu

Well, no.  That's an excellent answer to someone else's question, but
krdist would be a better answer to his question.  ;-)

But the real answer is:

The same way you maintain everything else on the same 4000 machines.
I assume if you're running 4000 machines you have some cookie-cutter
secured baseline OS load that gets installed on them all when they're
loaded, and then something like home-grown perl scripts wrapped around
rdist or rsync, or a specific tool for the purpose like cfengine or
synctree to push out changes and keep them all under control.  I would
assume that the sudoers file could be pushed out with the same
mechanism.  Or am I missing some implied complexity in your situation?
If the implication is that you have 4000 one-off machines, I retract
my next statement.  ;-)

BTW, I really envy "just me".  I have yet to work anywhere where every
[insert position here] is actually interchangable.  Must be nice.

IMHO,
Michael