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I’m aware of the risks of a compromised machine, but if a company doesn’t trust its own software devs with local root/Administrator privileges (which are absolu

I’m aware of the risks of a compromised machine, but if a company doesn’t trust its own software devs with local root/Administrator privileges (which are absolutely required for doing one’s job in SWE if you’re doing anything in drivers/hardware) then they don’t trust them to do their job. It boggles the mind.

everforward 4y ago
There are reasons beyond compromised machines. Some companies have compliance/insurance concerns that require things to be set up a certain way, and to prevent users from undoing them. E.g. full disk encryption might be required, and users prevented from undoing that. Maybe there's some kind of audit agent that needs to run, and you don't want users removing it. Others don't want engineers breaking their desktops, or setting things up in a way where it's going to break the automation. E.g. systemd-networkd is centrally managed, but some user hates it so they're using network-manager instead, and now they can't connect to the network because network port control got turned on. Amortize that across several thousand engineers and you can waste a lot of man-hours because people aren't using the tools they're supposed to. I like having full root/admin permissions, but I don't really need or want 95% of the permissions it gives me. Linux makes it hard to delegate the 5% I actually want/need without giving me the other 95% that are basically only ever going to be problematic.
TristanBall 4y ago
See.. my mind boggles that you think it has anything todo with personal trust. At a guess, you've been in that scenario, and it may well have been handled badly ( and i'll grant you it often is ), but you might also have taken it just a little bit personally? It's not my current job, but I've been doing various forms of sysadmin for a long, long time. Biggest security/outage risk in most companies I've work at? Me. My teams. Even after we've spent years and millions of dollars addressing those risks. But it's not about trusting your devs, even if somehow, you think you can trust all of them, and all your future hires, every day, forever (!?!?!) It's whether or not you trust all the software on their machine, everyday, forever. Which is just as ridiculous a statement. Isolated dev environments aren't that hard to setup if you really need HW access. Do it right and you might even end up with something better than local. And no, I don't have admin on my current work laptop either. Yes, it's occasionally annoying, and we have tighter controls than that, i cant do a bunch of things that most envs would allow without thought - and I occasionally set of alarms that trigger the security folks to have a word, which is also occasionally annoying. Reassuring too tho. And actually, slightly disappointed that's it's generally just a phonecall, and polite conversation, rather than black masked ninjas rappelling down from the ceiling yelling at me to step away from the keyboard, but you can't have everything I guess.

everforward 4y ago

There are reasons beyond compromised machines. Some companies have compliance/insurance concerns that require things to be set up a certain way, and to prevent users from undoing them. E.g. full disk encryption might be required, and users prevented from undoing that. Maybe there's some kind of audit agent that needs to run, and you don't want users removing it. Others don't want engineers breaking their desktops, or setting things up in a way where it's going to break the automation. E.g. systemd-networkd is centrally managed, but some user hates it so they're using network-manager instead, and now they can't connect to the network because network port control got turned on. Amortize that across several thousand engineers and you can waste a lot of man-hours because people aren't using the tools they're supposed to. I like having full root/admin permissions, but I don't really need or want 95% of the permissions it gives me. Linux makes it hard to delegate the 5% I actually want/need without giving me the other 95% that are basically only ever going to be problematic.

TristanBall 4y ago

See.. my mind boggles that you think it has anything todo with personal trust. At a guess, you've been in that scenario, and it may well have been handled badly ( and i'll grant you it often is ), but you might also have taken it just a little bit personally? It's not my current job, but I've been doing various forms of sysadmin for a long, long time. Biggest security/outage risk in most companies I've work at? Me. My teams. Even after we've spent years and millions of dollars addressing those risks. But it's not about trusting your devs, even if somehow, you think you can trust all of them, and all your future hires, every day, forever (!?!?!) It's whether or not you trust all the software on their machine, everyday, forever. Which is just as ridiculous a statement. Isolated dev environments aren't that hard to setup if you really need HW access. Do it right and you might even end up with something better than local. And no, I don't have admin on my current work laptop either. Yes, it's occasionally annoying, and we have tighter controls than that, i cant do a bunch of things that most envs would allow without thought - and I occasionally set of alarms that trigger the security folks to have a word, which is also occasionally annoying. Reassuring too tho. And actually, slightly disappointed that's it's generally just a phonecall, and polite conversation, rather than black masked ninjas rappelling down from the ceiling yelling at me to step away from the keyboard, but you can't have everything I guess.