root access for end users

[Yuri Csapo <ycsapo@mines.edu>]

After a battle of years, "academic freedom" was invoked and very senior 
management, in its infinite wisdom, has decided that our users (mostly 
researchers) should have root access (or full sudo, which amounts to the 
same thing) to their Linux workstations.

Does anybody have experience running a Unix/Linux network like this?

Remember full sudo means the ability to 'sudo su' and become any other 
user, making permissions (even across NFS) useless. It also means the 
ability to play with/pilfer/replace Kerberos keytabs, allowing one to 
impersonate any box to which they have access. The support nightmare 
cannot be used as an argument against this because users have convinced 
management that "that's what support is for."

All I can do is control the servers and decide how services will be 
presented and which hoops users should go through to be able to use 
server resources.

The current environment is basically Kerberos authentication, NIS 
authorization and NFS/CUPS services. Most of the clients are owned, 
built, maintained and supported by my organization, but some users will 
use their new found freedom to build/buy their own boxes.

The plan is to move away from NIS to LDAP and from NFS to AFS.

What other problems do people see? Any thoughts and suggestions will be 
greatly appreciated.

TIA!

Yuri