Post by @stratself@lemdro.id

2026-10-10 01:33 UTC

Dedicated admin account or normal privileged users? 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!

Replies (3)

@frongt@lemmy.zip 2026-10-10 02:52

I certainly wouldn’t give people admin. Too much risk of them accidentally breaking stuff.

Open ##5075434
@Lem453@lemmy.ca 2026-10-10 04:12

Keep your personal account separate from the admin. Don’t even think of making other users admin on a self hosted server. If you need to login, open a private tab in your browser and use a password manager to quickly login with admin credentials.

Open ##5077783
@stratself@lemdro.id 2026-10-12 05:46

Hi all, thanks again for the valuable insights, I really appreciate your comments. I realized I’ve overlooked a few topologies, namely that of having granular accounts for different admining purposes/different services (and using different names for them). Also, my IDP (Kanidm) also has a service accounts feature which can be delegated to real human accounts, so I think I should also be looking into that. It’d be nice to have something like a “second password” for granting temporary privileged access to other apps’ admin commands, but OIDC doesn’t work this way sadly. Lastly I’d also need to consider managing SSH and non-app stuff as well.

Open ##5138059