Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-edu (292 mails)

[kevin.taylor@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

> Ambiguous pronunciation can be a problem

Well yes, but this is pronounced "Open Source in Education"
- which is its name :-)

> a much more elegant and secure solution is to create an
> "osieadmin" group that has write access to all the relevant
> configuration files

Agreed - but your first email suggested
"The main restriction is likely to be that we need a server on which
we can get full root access, because it would be good to be able
to install and run arbitrary programs"
- to which I responded that the 'we' is the important word - the
admin team must be able to do what is required.

For a volunteer organisation it is important to have several key
people for all tasks.  I see 3 levels of control required here:
1. Physical machine access
2. Admin access
3. Site content access

If only the owners of the machine are in a position to manage
(1), then maybe a ISP hosted machine would be best (if we find one
willing - like uklinux.net).  It means that we don't need to worry
ever having to go over to the machine to do anything physical to
it (new disks, etc) - this is the ISPs problem, not us as admins,
and the ISP should have several people on the job as a matter
of course.  This does assume that we have enough control over
(2) to be of use though ... which is not always the case.

Of course we could have a dedicated machine (if we can talk
nicely to someone to give us one :-) - but as an admin member
of lug.org.uk (we have our own machine, installed in an ISP) I
know that if something really nasty happens, someone has to
drive to Leeds to sort it out - so for really serious problems,
this is not ideal - ok, we have a solution to (1) but it is not too
practical ... however, there is a team of 5 or 6 people who are
able to  do what is required in all other cases (2), when things
need to be done - so this works pretty well.

So it may well be that your suggestion is fine, as long as (2)
provides enough control to do what is required, without
permitting any chance of causing a problem with your
own site.  (I am not quite sure how this could be managed
at the moment as presumably you would be using apache
with virtual hosting to manage both sites ... so would the
admin team have access to your /etc/httpd.conf ?  Or similarly
with /etc/named.conf, etc ?)

Something to think about.

Kevin.