RE: Tiered admins with cfengine / dual control

[Martin, Jason H]

Along the same lines, has anyone implemented a system such that there is
no one person capable of pushing out changes?  I'm talking about a
system analogous to the nuclear missile keys that require 2 people to
agree to launch.  

The scenario here is how would the college protect itself from Jason
Edgecombe, as a top-level SA, deciding to bring down the entire
university infrastruture.

CFE doesn't support this directly, but perhaps it could be managed via a
module. I'm thinking it'd have to be based on two different master
servers agreeing on a configuration, with discrepencies causing CFE to
fail into a internal-maintenance-only mode. Assuming that each master
server has a mutually exclusive set of root users, it'd have to be
something that none of them could subvert on their own.

Thank you,
-Jason Martin

> -----Original Message-----
> From: 
> help-cfengine-bounces+jason.h.martin=cingular.com@gnu.org 
> [mailto:help-cfengine-bounces+jason.h.martin=cingular.com@gnu.
> org] On Behalf Of Mark Burgess
> Sent: Thursday, October 13, 2005 7:34 AM
> To: Jason Edgecombe
> Cc: help-cfengine@gnu.org
> Subject: Re: Tiered admins with cfengine
> 
> 
> On Thu, 2005-10-13 at 09:56 -0400, Jason Edgecombe wrote:
> > Hi everyone,
> > 
> > I work at a university, and we are currently using cfengine in our
> > college to manage some linux and Mac machines. In our 
> college, there are 
> > two admins including myself who are trusted and have total 
> control of 
> > the cfengine config.
> > 
> > Using cfengine has been proposed as being adopted by the entire
> > University for Mac administration. My concern is how do we 
> inherit the 
> > campus config and only let people in our college modify the 
> config that 
> > affects our machines.
> > 
> > For example, I am in the College of Arts & Sciences and I can only
> > change the cfengine configs for machines in my college. The 
> college of 
> > Architecture would only have access to their machines, but we both 
> > inheirt the changes pushed out by central IT.
> > I simply want to limit the effects of accidental changes made by 
> > different admins. It's not just newbieness that I'm worried 
> about. I 
> > don't have a full understanding of what my changes might do 
> to another 
> > college's computers.
> > 
> > Basically, how can we partition the cfengine set up between admins, 
> > but
> > still inherit a config from central it? Do we have to use different 
> > cfengine servers for this?
> > 
> > Thanks,
> > Jason
> 
> Hi Jason - you don't have to use different cfengine servers 
> for this, but you could, The way to inherit things is to use 
> overridable "includes". One way to organize the permissions 
> is to use CVS or subversion and put the different files in 
> different projects so that one needs permission to edit them.
> 
> Mark
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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