I work for a government contractor, and have recently convinced them to purchase a Beowulf cluster, and start moving their numeric modelers from Sun to Linux. Like most historically UNIX shops, they don't allow users even low-level SUDO access, to do silly things like change file permissions or ownerships, in a tracked environment. I am an ex-*NIX admin myself ,so I understand their perspective and wish to keep control over the environment, but as a user, I'm frustrated by having to frequently call the help-desk just to get a file ownership changed or a specific package installed.

If you're an admin, do you allow your users basic SUDO rights like chmod, cp, mv, etc (assuming all SUDO commands are logged to a remote system)? If no, why don't you? If you allow root access to your knowledgeable users (ie developers with Linux experience), what do you do to keep them 'in line'?"

The link for this article located at Slashdot.org is no longer available.