At our company the Linux system administration is handled by the security team. The guy assigned to my project has been a great big pain, and has seemed to me at several points to be of questionable competence. (Maybe he's qualified to be a junior sysadmin, but not a security expert who also handles Linux system administration. Perhaps he's good with other aspects of security or something I'm not aware of, but he's said things that make me question his competence in this particular role.)
He locks things down in ways that make my job very difficult, and without any good reasons that I can see or that he can explain to me. (E.g. I can't use chown
or chgrp
on files I own, and he claims that giving me that ability would be a security hole.) If I trusted his general competence more I would assume that he simply understands things I don't understand.
One thing that is a thorn in my side is that I have to use sudo
before drush
(a script used for command line access to Drupal servers) and this breaks drush's ability to communicate with other servers, since it's not running under my credentials and therefore the use of ssh keys is screwed up.
It occurred to me, though, that since
- drush can run arbitrary command aliases
- drush is running with root privileges
I can now run arbitrary code on that box. I tested with an alias to whoami
and it returned root
, so it appears that I do in fact now have the ability to gain root privileges.
What should I do?
Although (in effect) he gave me root access, I think actually using it would be a really bad idea. (Although it's really tempting: I might actually be able to get some work done now!)
Is it my responsibility to do more than report this problem? And to whom???
Am I responsible to report (what I think may be) the problem behind the problem? In other words, his lack of suitability for this particular role? Although I'd really like to not have him on my project I don't want to cost him his job.
Or is there something else I should do that I'm not even thinking of?
UPDATE: I should have mentioned that this sysadmin is on vacation today, so I can't report it to him until Monday at the earliest. I don't know if this changes anything, or suggests a need to report to someone today?