I'll add another Raytheon Sudbury issue. We had a 16 cpu HP V2500
system in the lab for testing. While this machine was available to other
engineers on the program, the primary user was Charlie Murphy. Charlie
was testing all sorts of things and doing performance benchmarks. He
was also testing a new feature of the OS that was supplied specifically
for Raytheon. Because of the type of work Charlie was doing, he would
frequently cause zombies or other types of processes which sometimes
required a reboot. Eventhough this machine belonged to the radar
program, the IT people in Sudbury were insistent that none of the
engineers have root privs. Additionally, this was the system that was
supposed to be used for my fibrechannel driver. Every time Charlie
needed to reboot the machine he had to call the IT people. Finally after a
month or so, they set up sudo, and allowed him to issue the shutdown
command.
While not all engineers have a need for priviledged access to their
desktop machine, there are many circumstances where denying root priv
is counter productive.
Back in my former group, even in our personal workstations, we would
frequently install alpha and beta level code, or we might need to
reconfigure a system in a certain way to reproduce a problem. While, in
Ken's mind, this is a lab function, the intent of an engineering workstation
is to do work, and for a software developer that is development and
testing of new code and tracking bugs in old code.
--
Jerry Feldman
Contractor, eInfrastructure Partner Engineering
508-467-4315 http://www.testdrive.compaq.com/linux/
Compaq Computer Corp.
200 Forest Street MRO1-3/F1
Marlboro, Ma. 01752
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