Hi all. I’ve been wondering about account separations while reviewing my SSO stuff. Do you all create a separate account for administrative tasks for your services? Or do you just give your normal account admin rights?
In my opinion, a different account is nice to separate impactful admin work (like provisioning users and groups) from general usage. Having this UX “barrier” also somewhat prevents doing dumb things like accidentally deactivating other people’s accounts. But the downside is it can be quite inconvenient, especially if I need to administer or debug something quickly. I’m also not sure if my homelab expands, should I share the admin user credentials with other human admins or not.
What’s the best topology to use? Or is there some other “accounts structure” that I’ve missed? I’m looking to replicate the same mapping between my identity provider and all dependent services as well (so that if an account is marked as admin on the IDP, it’ll also be the admin for Forgejo or my Matrix server). So it’d be nice to settle on a plan right now.
Thanks for any responses!
In general, shared accounts/credentials aren’t recommended; each user should have their own account. Even in a homelab setting, the audit trail may prove useful in ways that are difficult to foresee.
In general, separation of privileges is recommended. However, the granularity should be informed by the risks mitigated. In an enterprise setting, more risks are generally mitigated by more granularity. In a homelab setting, there are diminishing returns. A risk assessment will determine the appropriate configuration in your environment, but in general, if the scope or severity of an incident wouldn’t be substantially lessened, it is better to accept the risk than to mitigate it.