Would you give shell access to one or more of your other admins. They can help manage the backups or fix bugs, etc.. But even if you trust them, would you give them access to your account with ftp and even ssh shell, or keep that to yourself?

If I trusted them enough and knew that they understood what they were doing, shell access wouldnt be a problem. There are several ways to set up permissions on a system, so adding them to just what they need should be sufficent, sudo is also an alternative. As for giving them access to your personal account, be it ftp or shell, no way, i want to know who to beat if someone messes things up ;)

Well, I am an administrator of a forum which has 17k users, I am not the owner. But the owners trust me and give me the ftp & shell l/p.

Everything ends in trusting. If you trust someone or if someone trusts you, everything is ok. ;)

I usually have no problem giving one other admin access to my entire server. :) When I had my old site online, I did the same thing.

But, besides that, that's usually it.

Depends. I trust them enough, or else they wouldn't be admins. But I'd need to know they understand what kind of power they wielded ;) I wouldn't want to give shell access to the guy and have him accidentally delete everything for example.

exactly what Chroder said. Trust is all fine and dandy, but if said person doesnt know what (s)he's doing and goes asking for help, someone might give out bad advice and fry the whole setup. In my opinion you need a little of both to get access to anything important.

I agree with what's already been said. I would really have to trust the person in order to give them that level of access. I personally haven't had any problems with fellow administrators abusing their power, but a friend of mine has, and let me tell you, giving that particular member shell access was a big mistake. Luckily, he didn't cause too much damage (it was easily repairable), but it could have been quite a mess.

Chris

Depends how long i have known them for, and if i felt they could be trusted.
Question is, would they even need shell (SSH) access?

Probably not.

I would probably give them FTP access though..
But i likely wouldnt give them SSH or WHM access..

for 2 of my forums (where i had been active in past) I have provided complete server access (including shell access, etc.) to my co-admin who does the work effeciently.

I give my other administrator full access. She isn't really technically savvy but she's able to do basic things and it's nice having someone else back up the database regularly.

I don't think I'd do so unless there is a really urgent need for it. I did do so once a bunch of years back and that person turned his back on me and decided it'd be cool to erase all files and online stored backups; lost quite a few posts in that as the latest backup was 4 days old. I don't quite feel like repeating that, you never know what people might do.

Not likely, He's even dumber than I am!!:D

some of them, i trust them only if i know them for long time or they are real-life friends