View on GitHub

Login and shell access

On this page

Unlike personal SRCF accounts, group accounts do not come with an “SRCF password”, which means you can’t authenticate as a group account over SSH or file transfer protocols. Groups are given a UNIX shell account but without a password or shell configured.

Instead, you should connect using your personal account, which will have write access to well-maintained files in group accounts where you’re listed as a group account admin.

Running commands

For ad-hoc commands that need to be run as the group’s user account, you can use sudo:

sudo -u <groupname> <command> <args>...

If you see a warning about not being permitted to use sudo, make sure you’ve selected the right group account (the -u <groupname> part of the command above).

To use certain systemd commands like systemctl or journalctl, you’ll also need to override an environment variable in order for those to work correctly:

sudo -Hu <groupname> XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=/run/user/$(id -u <groupname>) <command> <args>...

You might like to add a function to your ~/.bashrc to make this easier to remember:

asgroup () {
    name=$1
    shift
    sudo -Hu $name XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=/run/user/$(id -u $name) "$@"
}

Usage:

asgroup <groupname> <command> <args>...

For long-running or background programs that should be always-on and restored on server reboot, see Scheduled tasks.

Last modified on Friday Dec 8, 2023 by Richard Allitt