users can create/rm/touch files/directories by themself?

[Hanry Zhou]

This is maybe not a technical question, but more like policy/conduct type of question.

My users constantly ask me to do things like create/rm/touch files or directories under quite a few user owned directories, and further more, they oftenly make these type of requests as urgent ones, and page me even in the middle night.

But, the thing is directories they wanted me to create/rm files on are owned by themself(owned by the application id and grouped by application group), so they have full access to these directories, and all these jobs can be done by themself.

Should I ask them to do these by themself, and what is the appropriate tune I should use when I ask them do by their own?

Thanks!
Please advice.

[Mel Burslan]

if your users are not unix savvy, doing the file removals yourself, would save you a big headache later down the road. The last thing I want to hear from a user is :

"ummm .. I typed rm -r under my home directory, now I can not find my files"

and you know if your users are not aware of the unix commands' power, sooner or later this is going to happen.

File/directory creation should be handled by users themselves but deletion is a different matter.

Another way to do this is to alias the rm command to rm -i

alias rm="/sbin/rm -i"

and you can put this into /etc/profile which will make it effective for all the users, which will force them to confirm every each file they want to delete.

Also, if this is a operating standart in your organization, I would ask for more manpower to assist with after hour requests. Getting waken up in the middle of the night to create or delete files/directories, does not constitute an emergency in my books but it is different for everyone. On the funny side, it provides job security I presume :)

[Scot Bean]

Yes, if the files / directories are fully owned by the user, and the directory permissions are setup correctly, they should be able to do these things by themselves.

It may take a bit a training, but it sounds like you are getting called in for stuff they should be able to handle, and you could use the sleep.

[iminus]

Probably you can tell them you have granted the privileges to their accounts and they are now authorized to perform those tasks.

I think users will be excited to know they are "privileged" and "authorized" and they can perform the tasks using those "privileges"...

[Abdul Rahiman]

You should thik about setting up "sudo" and force the users to run the "privileged commands' via sudo (I would probable setup my own little scripts for this and give sudo access to the script itself). And let the users know that all the command executions will be logged and audited ..