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For someone with absolutely no expertise in linux or EC2 - how can I install the Rstudio server update on an EC2 instance? I tried using the recipe from rstudio (https://www.rstudio.com/products/rstudio/download-server/) utilizing the shell provided in rstudio. However, upon running sudo apt-get install gdebi-coreI´m told rstudio is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported. I guess Rstudio user thus does not have administrative privileges on the instance. How can I change this so that I can update Rstudio server? Is this possible to do through the shell provided in rstudio or would I need to log on using ssh?

Misha
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1 Answers1

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For security reasons it's preferable to avoid giving administrative privileges to the RStudio user. R code can run arbitrary shell commands and there are a lot of ways to get RStudio to run arbitrary R code.

You have a couple of choices:

  1. If you have an account on the server which does have superuser privileges, you could su username from the RStudio shell to become that user, then perform the task.

  2. As you mentioned, you could log in via ssh to perform the upgrade.

Depending on the configuration of your EC2 machine, the privileged user might have a disabled password (logging in via a certificate file only) so #2 may be your only option.

Jonathan
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  • Thx-- seems #2 is the way to go. However, one of my instances was set up without a keypair upon configuring it. Is there any way I can ssh into it now without using a keypair? – Misha Feb 10 '16 at 20:21