[development] Security Around Setting Up a Sandbox

[Daniel F. Kudwien]

Reposting this from the consulting list to the proper list: 

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Date: Mon, 2 Nov 2009 13:09:08 -0500
From: Shai Gluskin <shai at content2zero.com>

Gang,

I'm real excited about Drupal 7. Just listened to the Lullabot podcast and
it's amazing how much has gotten in.

I want to help increase the number of people looking at D7 who don't have to
install it themselves in order to get more people:

   1. Finding bugs
   2. Finding UI issues
   3. Helping with documentation
   4. Getting excited about D7

I'm thinking of providing a sandbox on my server. I have found one other D7
sandbox at http://drupal7.socialconstruction.ca/. The D7 version at that
site was a month old. In addition, he wasn't letting people into
administration sections, just letting people create content. He said the
reason was "for security."

I had planned to give people a LOT more access than that. I certainly was
*not *going to give folks FTP or administer users permissions, but otherwise
I was thinking of giving authenticated users a lot of permissions. I'm
planning on having the Demonstration Site module
<http://drupal.org/project/demo>running to take snapshots on cron (and I
wouldn't give people admin privileges on that, obviously). So I could set
the site back if someone comes along and messes things up.

I'm not particular worried about cpu capacity or bandwidth. This sandbox
will not get a lot of traffic.

So the question is: is there a security concern that opening up such a
sandbox would endanger the client accounts I have set up on the same
dedicated server. The d7sandbox account would share an IP, a hard drive, and
the same server configuration with my client accounts, but nothing else. Is
there a danger with this? Would giving that account a dedicated IP make it
any safer? Other thoughts???
Thanks,

Shai