>That starts to get into almost philosophical security issues.
>To some extent I consider this a good thing.  Physical access
>is the ultimate privilige, so you need to physically protect
>your data to the extent that it's worth to you.  If you've
>got physical protection anyway, then making physical access
>be required to do potentially destructive administration
>means you only one one avenue of compromise instead of
>physical and network.
>
>Having said that, because I have a combined CPU/auth/file
>server, I can, and sometimes do, cpu into it as the host
>owner and do administrative things that way.

You're right, that's probably a philosophical discussion.  As
a real-world example, where I work, we've got a bunch of AIX
servers out in our datacenter, which is a physically seperate
building down the street.  While we have physical access if we
need it, generally speaking everything can be done remotely,
including rebooting a system, because the HMC manages it and
provides virtual serial consoles.  But generally the HMC isn't
used once the partition is up, as all administration can be done
remotely, and a user can su to root if need be.  I've been using
the drawterm to hostowner trick too, but was thinking that since
Plan 9 doesn't recognize a root-equivalent user, the opportunity
is there to delegate permissions to any user (or group, ;) )such
that they should be able to perform root-like tasks as themselves.

If I were running a Plan 9 server on bare hardware in the datacenter,
I wouldn't want to have to take a hike every time I needed to do
certain activities, even though my key to the datacenter door grants
me physical access should I need it.  In this case, though, it's 
running under VMware ESXi, so the vSphere Client gives me remote
access to the console, much as the HMC does for the AIX systems, but
still...  My point is that if one wants to open themselves up to
another avenue of attack (albeit carefully controlled) by allowing
such things to be done via network, they should be able to.  So in
that sense, maybe drawterm'ing to hostowner is the appropriate answer...

Again, thanks for your responses!!

-Ben