Users provide their standard username and password and are authenticated to the system. The system then determines from an object set, such as a container hierarchy, whether the user should have special administrative privileges for any of the resources on the machine to which they are logging in. These administrative privileges can be determined from configurable sets of pre-existing relationships between the user and resources on the system, stored within the object set. If the user is an administrator, then the system sets the UID number for that user to the UID number for administrator users. The system can even be configured to set the administrative UID to be the UID for the super-user “root” (typically, zero). If the user has no administrative privileges, the system sets the UID number for that user to the user's standard UID number.