[Rygian]

Why should my user have the right to shut down a production box?

Having a tool to warn me that I'm about to do something I shouldn't be allowed to do is okay. Having proper access control would be better.

(Fun: 'boulette' is French for 'dumb mistake')

[deathanatos]

> Having proper access control would be better.

Some of us live on the "granted" side of that access control. I'm an SRE; I have access to a fair number of things. I worry about making dumb mistakes like that in the article due to sleep deprivation. The warning here might very well be a warning that you're about to do something that you are allowed to do.

In the specific example … sometimes rebooting a production machine is what needs doing. Ideally, there's a second VM, ideally, the services on the machine would gracefully drain, ideally, it wouldn't matter. Ideally. But the reality is that often they don't, whether because of developer laziness, incompetence, some ugly confluence of bullshit bugs that conspire to prevent sanity, etc., more often than not I want to be careful even when the process/theory would like to say "this is a fully automated & completely safe operation" — and half-asleep is not careful, and accidental allegedly safe commands while half asleep is where Murphy likes to rear his head.

I've definitely used techniques like this. Red prompts that scream "You're SSH'd into PROD dummy" also come to mind. I keep my kubectl context fixed to "local laptop" so that I am forced to always type out --context the_production_cluster when I want that.

Temet nosce.

[GuB-42]

The idea is to protect you from yourself. You already have root access to the production server, because you are the admin and you need it to do your job.

Fun followup: the image is from the French movie "Le dîner de cons", where the character depicted says "Oh la boulette", after making a gaffe.

[ramon156]

When you work at a bank and have multiple production boxes, this is pretty typical

[roblabla]

I mean, you're probably going to need to give the reboot rights to someone. For instance, the people in charge of applying kernel updates. And those people will, at this point, be prone to making a boulette.

[f1shy]

We used to have special user for such tasks, with long names and password that should make clear what you want to do. For example shutdown/youwillshutdownproductionXXXXXXX (with Xs being a “real” password) because the random part of the password and sometimes the “fix” part was changed, there was no way that muscle memory would take over.