On Tue, 13 Nov 2001, Kathy Montgomery wrote:

> Our Help Desk handles lots of questions on our LISTSERV service.
> Unfortunately, efficient troubleshooting in many cases requires site
> maintainer access to the LISTSERV server.  We have two people (myself
> being one of them) with this level of access.  Everyone else can't do so
> much as even see what lists are on the server.
>
> I could probably think of Unix-specific ways to solve the problem:
> limited login access to the server, or maybe a CGI running on the server
> that could grab very specific information and display it on the web
> (we'd have to make that secure, though).  Does LISTSERV provide a
> "read-only" access level suitable for, say, help desk troubleshooting?
> Or is it truly all-or-nothing access?

If you're talking about offering your Help Desk colleagues read-only
access to Listserv's log and other files, then that would be a function of
the operating system on which you run Listserv.

I am curious though, what kind of access exactly do you feel your Help
Desk colleagues need on your Listserv? Here at Temple University, probably
80% of the Help Desk calls are easily resolved without any special access
to Listserv. Another few percent of the calls require the Help Desk to
have ownership of the list involved. To solve that problem, I have set up
a mechanism wherein each list that gets created has our Help Desk's email
address designated as a quiet owner. That level of access has proven quite
sufficient for our needs.