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I wonder which is the standard or the non-written-rule for administrative users in the applications world. The specifics I would like to know about this are:

  • should there be a "pre-existing" admin? (like a fixed "root" user?)
  • should admin be able to create other admins?
  • should admins be able to remove other users' admin status? (and what about the original admin?)
  • what's the workaround if the application/enterprise has only one admin and they leave?

I have struggled with all of these in a case-per-case basis, but just now I was wondering if there is any common direction for good applications in these matters.

PS: Sorry if this is not the correct question board for this. I wasn't really sure which forum fit better for this question. Feel free to move around if you think it should be somewhere else.

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I think this question is too vague to answer properly, and you have posed multiple questions. If you break your questions up and give appropriate context for them (What are you trying to do? What type of application? What are your security requirements? Who are your customers?), I think you'll get more helpful answers. Depending on what you're doing, Stack Overflow or Security (with the appsec tag) might be a better fit for these questions. – Stephen Jennings Oct 5 '11 at 0:30
admins I take 2, the person keeping it running, and the person paying for it, with the person paying for it having the ability to wipe the person keeping it running off the charts :-) that is if you want to avoid the disgruntled employee problem. – Psycogeek Oct 5 '11 at 2:40
Hi, thanks for the feedback. I will gladly make this question better and post it where it works better. However, I fail to see how the question was ambiguous. My question was: "Which is the standard for admin. user capabilities?" and the rest of it was an extension of what the answer should cover. Did I fail to specify that or you're seeing something else I don't? Thanks! – Alpha Oct 5 '11 at 23:59
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closed as not a real question by Stephen Jennings, surfasb, Breakthrough, slhck, Nifle Oct 5 '11 at 18:06

It's difficult to tell what is being asked here. This question is ambiguous, vague, incomplete, overly broad, or rhetorical and cannot be reasonably answered in its current form. See the FAQ for guidance on how to improve it.

1 Answer

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I'm not sure if this is actually written down anywhere, but I generally use one "superuser" account (root user) that has access to everything, and then multiple "admin" accounts that have limited permissions compared to the superuser, then user accounts below that.

It all depends on your situation as to how much more limited the admin accounts are and who exactly gets the superuser password.

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