Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by armored_mammal 4862 days ago
So I'll agree with many of the commentators that several of the practices suggested aren't 'ideal.' However, they are easy and possibly better than having no 'practice' at all.

Just as an example, the shared user account with unique SSH keys per user. Sure, it's obnoxious in some respects, but many of the criticisms I'm reading in the comments like "but they could reinstate their access with a cron job that re-adds their key when they leave" and such are silly - presumably those who are using the shared account are developers/sysadmins with sudo privileges. Regardless of whether they have a shared account they have privileges to do whatever they feel like to the systems in question. Hence I'd argue it's a fairly reasonable solution for the situation when you don't have the time/resources to configure something more complex and you have to trust all parties anyway.

I think there are two larger takeaways:

First - Managing multiple users across many servers and dev systems is not easy enough, particularly for smaller organizations, and only gets worse when you try to get more granular about who can do what.

Second - umm... no idea anymore. Forgot what was second. Automation is good?