We are a relatively small shop (as far as number of sysadmins) with a mix of RHEL, Solaris, Windows 2003 and Windows 2008 servers; about 200 servers in all.
For our administrator accounts (root
in Linux and admnistrator
in Windows), we have a password scheme that depends on the data center location and a couple of other documented properties of the server.
On Linux, our current practice is to create a shared non-privileged account where we could su
to root
. On Windows-based systems, we create an additional account with administrator privileges. Both of these accounts share the same password.
This has proven to be very inefficient. When somebody leaves our shop, we have to:
- Change the password scheme for the administrator accounts
- Generate a new administrator password for each and every server
- Come up with a new non-administrator account password
- Touch every server and change the passwords
I wanted to know if anyone in a similar environment can suggest a more sane way of managing these credentials. Some relevant information:
- Although most of our servers are part of our AD domain, not all are.
- We manage all our Linux servers with Puppet (key authentication was an option I thought of but it will only address the #3 concern from above).
- We provision Linux severs with Cobbler.
- About 10% of our hardware is dedicated to VMWare. In those cases, we use VMWare templates for server builds.
Any ideas or suggestions will be greatly appreciated. This is a problem that has been lingering for some time and I finally want to resolve it.