Re: Sysadmins

[Bas Wijnen]

On Wed, Nov 09, 2005 at 05:31:25PM +0100, address@hidden wrote:
> The point is that "bad ideas" do happen in the real world, as well as
> bad implementations, bad premises, and sheer bad luck. No matter how
> carefully you design your system, there will always be situations you
> didn't anticipate; and the ability for the admin to fix them without
> obstacles is absolutely crucial. That's why any attempt to limit his
> power is extremely problematic IMHO.

This can be extrapolated to the real world.  There too, there will be
situations that the lawmakers didn't anticipate.  The admin in this case is
the police (combined with the judicial system).  IMO we really do want to
limit their power when it comes to privacy, even if in the real world it _is_
possible that the problems are in some person's home and not on the street
(where the police is allowed to look).

Since on a computer system it is possible to design it in a way that the
problems the administrator needs to solve can only be be located on the user's
resources if he's solving them for the user, there is no reason to give him
access to it without user consent.  In the unlikely event that it is needed
anyway, _and_ it isn't a bug in the system (which can be fixed), we have to
decide if we should accept this problem, or solve it by allowing spying.  I'm
not sure what we would choose, but I don't think it'll ever happen.

Not sure who came up with the university example, but I have a comment on
that.  First the problem again:

What if your disk is suddenly full and you need more space, but you don't have
a spare disk.  There was the assumption that the sum of all quotas was larger
than the amount of disk space.

In my university, this assumption is not valid.  They don't trust students at
all, so they give them "enough".  There is more hard disk.  When a student
needs a larger disk for a project, he'll have to go to the administrator and
the quota will be enlarged on a case by case basis.  This may include showing
the administrator that you're having useful things on your account.  The
administrator doesn't go and delete files that _he_ considers useless.  Well,
in fact I know of one such occasion, but the administrator was reprimanded for
it.

Thanks,
Bas

-- 
I encourage people to send encrypted e-mail (see http://www.gnupg.org).
If you have problems reading my e-mail, use a better reader.
Please send the central message of e-mails as plain text
   in the message body, not as HTML and definitely not as MS Word.
Please do not use the MS Word format for attachments either.
For more information, see http://129.125.47.90/e-mail.html

signature.asc
Description: Digital signature