Comment by ac29

The student union mainly kept the full root privileges restricted to a select few students to avoid accidental destruction rather than as a measure against maliciousness.

After you had been a member for a while and demonstrated that you mostly knew what you were doing, they’d give you full root access if you had some reason to want it that they agreed with.

And thanks to the dedicated suid program that exec’d into apt, wanting to install additional software was not a reason to be granted full root privileges since everyone could already install packages from the apt repositories this way without full root privileges.

Along with full root access came basically just a couple of simple rules, one of which was:

Do not abuse your root access to walk into other members home directories.

That rule was put in place after a previous member with root access had used the root privileges to copy the homework of another member into his own home directory without asking the other member for permission to see his work.

Aside from that one thing happening that one time, there hadn’t really been anyone doing anything malicious AFAIK. We were a rather small group of members in this student union, and it was a pretty chill and nice place. People came there to hang out, drink beer and tinker with electronics and computers.

There wasn’t much that root privileges could be abused for anyway. Regular members could already use all of the machines via graphical login at the desks, and remotely over ssh. Really the main two things anyone could have done maliciously would be to steal other people’s homework (like that one guy was kicked out for doing), or to steal credentials from others (no known cases of that happening there).

And if someone had started acting really maliciously, using the student union computers to attack the wider network, the university would have been on top of that real fast. The computer network of the student union was a subnet of the university network, and this university had a very competent crew of people watching over the university computer network as a whole.

A friend of mine once wondered how many computers were on the university computer network in total and did a port scan from one of the university computers (not from the student union computers). It did not take long from he started the port scan until university employees contacted him and gave him a stern talking to, and also told him the proper way find the answer to how many computers were on the university network.