I want to allow certain trusted users the ability to take down my lemmy instance or reboot it or x, y, z actions in case things go wrong or there is a security incident.
Ideally I would want to have some sort of admin interface that’s secure and tested and allow these users to have some sort of login and from there have the ability to execute certain actions that could correspond to a “break glass in case of emergency” scenario.
I’ve been pointed at https://www.portainer.io/ but they seem to have a steep price for the limited use-case that I would be giving it.
I know about some admin interfaces like webmin, but I don’t know which one allow you to create very restricted users or just give users the ability to execute some limited pre-defined commands.
Thank you <3
If what you need to accomplish can be achieved via shell commands, it would be hard to beat OliveTin for this use case.
Thank you! I’ll look into it!
Edit: actually that sound exactly like what I had in mind!!
I’d go the SSH + sudo way.
Sudo can be quite finely tuned to only allow specific commands. If you want to lock the SSH session further, look into
rbash.This was my first thought.
I do this for a living and it’s literally built into Linux.
Set their permissions carefully, ensure that the permission set does what you want (and not a bunch of stuff you don’t want), and keep on keeping on.
Thank you! I’ll have a look!
Cockpit is quite mature and sponsored by Red Hat. Your users can log in with their normal account on the system which you can lockdown however you want.
Thank you! I’ll look into it!
I was like, “Portainer costs money? When did that happen. I thought it was open source.” Granted it has been awhile since I used it.
You want to check out the Community Edition. Here’s their Github.
I’ve been pointed at https://www.portainer.io/ but they seem to have a steep price for the limited use-case that I would be giving it.
Portainer is totally Free, also, you can get a free Business Edition licence for 3 nodes https://www.portainer.io/take-3
Slightly off topic, but are there not security concerns about opening up a portainer instance to the internet? I run portainer for all of my intranet hosted containers but I have reservations about running either the agent or portainer itself on something external to my lan. It seems like an easy attack vector but maybe I’m just overly worried?
Can you use SSH?
Possibly, but it would have to be so severely locked down that it makes more sense to have a web interface with a few buttons that do some very basic actions, including making my phone ring or stuff like that.
That seems almost exactly what the sudoers file is meant for.
If several actions have to happen at once (call the phone first), or need parameters, or need a kill switch, that is what a script with the SETUID bit does.
