Sharing root...managed providers sound off

[raindog308]

I don't have any managed hosting at the moment, but when I did, I was always curious about how shared root was handled.

I've used both KnownHost and WiredTree (pre-Site5) in the past. Both gave me VMs with root, but they were managed. So if I had a question about cPanel or something, they'd come in and help. But I did have root.

I always wondered how "oops, I ran rm -rf in the wrong dir" would have been handled. I'm an ex-sysadmin so I know what I'm doing, but I'm guessing the average subscriber doesn't.

So do providers say "we'll help, at $X per hour"? Or "your only choice is a reinstall"? IIRC, KH once did a reinstall for me at my request because some of the setup had been changed, and that was free, but the account manager had to approve...presumably so people weren't reinstalling every week.

I face this issue at work frequently - big company, thousands of apps, dozens of teams. Systems team doesn't want to share root, but crappy app requires it, so you get into sudo and such and next think you know there's an outage because some app developer ran the wrong command...and these guys are salaried professionals I can only imagine what it's like when it's any joe Internet user.

Maybe it's not a frequent issue...just curious.

 

[maounique]

Sharing root =/= managed in my view.
We need to have clear responsibilities. Unless there is a very comprehensive disclaimer basically saying if something is screwed up, it is the user's fault, I would not do it.
However, since all managed accounts have daily automatic back-ups for at least a week back, there is some insurance, but, in order to make sure the user doesnt do the same thing again (usually sharing root with someone else they hired over the internet and have no idea what they are up to) I will charge seriously for my time.

 

[Jonathan]

I always wondered how "oops, I ran rm -rf in the wrong dir" would have been handled.

We offer to restore from backups. It's not as frequent as you think that people break their own stuff that bad.

What's far worse is just customers who can't leave things along, that constantly have to be messing with stuff, and as a result we get multiple tickets from them every single day and have for years. We really have some of those...

 

[WSWD]

I've heard that a lot of managed companies don't get root access for exactly that reason. People try to SSH with some articles they find on the internet and everything is magically screwed up the next day. Would get old. I don't know how you deal with it @Jonathan. I would not have the patience for it.

 

[Jonathan]

I've heard that a lot of managed companies don't get root access for exactly that reason. People try to SSH with some articles they find on the internet and everything is magically screwed up the next day. Would get old. I don't know how you deal with it @Jonathan. I would not have the patience for it.

It's always best logging into one of our customer's VPSs which are all CentOS, only to see apt-get commands in /root/.bash_history

 

[maounique]

It's always best logging into one of our customer's VPSs which are all CentOS, only to see apt-get commands in /root/.bash_history

That is not funny... It happens to me more than once a day...

 

[ChrisM]

I've heard that a lot of managed companies don't get root access for exactly that reason. People try to SSH with some articles they find on the internet and everything is magically screwed up the next day. Would get old. I don't know how you deal with it @Jonathan. I would not have the patience for it.

I hopped out of sales an into support for a bit and ended up with someone who imported a Database to the root MySQL user and removed several core MySQL tables...

 

[fm7]

I face this issue at work frequently - big company, thousands of apps, dozens of teams. Systems team doesn't want to share root, but crappy app requires it, so you get into sudo and such and next think you know there's an outage because some app developer ran the wrong command...and these guys are salaried professionals I can only imagine what it's like when it's any joe Internet user.

I'm trying to solve this using LXC.

 

[maounique]

ran the wrong command...and these guys are salaried professionals

I just remembered the AWS outage because some guy fat fingered a command. You can never protect 100% from human error. It is simply not possible.

 

[farhanideas]

If you scared with sharing root password on managed service than you can keep changing password you issue solve when you share password with any else