Hiring Admin & Security

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Posted by dynawebd, 07-18-2008, 11:52 AM
I am considering hiring an administrator for a couple servers. I have Plesk and Cpanel on Linux Redhat. My question is one of security. Does hiring a server admin mean submission of my root passwords? Or is there some other way to allow them the access to some lower admin level without having root access?
Posted by Dark Light, 07-18-2008, 12:14 PM
Generally if you need to hire a server administrator, they would need administrator access as their title suggests. This would mean they would need "root" access on *nix servers or "administrator" access on Windows servers. So in answer to your question; they would indeed (usually) need full root access to perform their duties, though this may differ a bit depending on what they actually need to do. Keep in mind that with full root access to your server they could quite easily create other super-users; but you have to have trust in your server administrators before you hire them. If you don't have trust, why would you give them your root login details? Hope that helps,
Posted by SysAdminMan, 07-18-2008, 12:20 PM
It's possible to grant admin access to 'parts' of the system using sudo but it could be quite tricky to setup depending what rights you want to give to the admin. Depending what you want them to do they might be able to get by with a normal user account. Ultimately though they're probably going to need root access, either directly or via sudo. Matt
Posted by Srv24x7, 07-18-2008, 02:33 PM
It entirely depends on the work that you need to get done from them, Most system admins will require root access as they hate working as normal user where things are sometimes difficult.
Posted by dynawebd, 07-18-2008, 03:07 PM
Thanks for the replies. Specifically I need them to do account migrations from an older Plesk server to a newer one.
Posted by Srv24x7, 07-18-2008, 03:13 PM
Are the plesk servers Windows ? or Linux ?
Posted by anoopadmin, 07-19-2008, 01:42 AM
For account migration you can do it from the plesk control panel very easily. For account migration the administrator needs the plesk superuser (admin) privilege.
Posted by CoderJosh, 07-20-2008, 06:30 AM
The problem with limiting access is that quite often it's hard to tell in advance what privileges are needed in detail. So it's usually not very efficient to try to restrict access, as the admin might run into restrictions on the way that prevent them to get the job done. So it all boils down to trust. You need to be able to trust the admin you hire. Then you're comfortable to grant root access.

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