[Freeipa-users] Roles and permissions

[Rob Crittenden]

Steven Jones wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Trying to get my head around these....is it possible to create a group administrator say "engineering team administrator"  and have that role only able to add specific users (how to specify?) to specific user groups (say) ie I want to be able to delegate responsibility for limited groups and users to others and limit their functioanilty...?

Need a little more to go on. It is that "how to specify" question that 
really matters. How DO you distinguish between users? You can add extra 
attributes to break them into groups, or you can literally put them into 
extra groups and manage them that way (easiest). But you definitely need 
a way to distinguish them.

Creating this type of permission would require a bit of LDAP knowledge, 
mostly just knowing which attributes to use. It all depends on what 
responsibility you are delegating.

I'm not entirely sure what you're after so I don't want to guess and end 
up down a deep rabbit hole, but it is probably going to be easiest to 
break the permissions into smaller components like:

Users in group A can manage the membership of group B
Users in group A can manage this small set of attributes of members of 
group B

Both of these are relatively straightforward. I can provide examples if 
you can give me some more guidance on what you're looking for.

> I dont find that section of the manual very easy to understand....I'd like examples or more explanation....
>
> Also if such a say (bad) "engineering team administrator" could add anyone say THE admin to a group that the (bad) admin had password changes in/on then this allows the bad admin to change that admin user password............the user then effectively owns the IPA system...?

Yes, it would be a problem if you granted password change permission to 
a bad admin. That is true in any system.

Given that we've got a ticket open to limit those who can change the 
password of those in the admins group to those in the admins group, so 
helpdesk can change user's passwords but not admins. That is currently 
possible.

regards

rob