Working as aegir user

It can be convenient to do stuff as the aegir user. The default shell of the aegir user is /bin/false, so you have to make sure to use something more usable:

sudo su aegir -s /bin/bash

GNU Screen is a super useful window manager for the console. When launching screen you will usually get errors like

Cannot open your terminal '/dev/pts/6' - please check.

You can get around this by running

script /dev/null

All in all this works nicely:

sudo su aegir -s /bin/bash -c "script -q /dev/null"

It can be convenient to put it in a little script as /usr/local/bin/suaegir

Allowing other users besides root on your system to run commands as aegir

If you wish to allow other users on your system to run commands as the aegir user using sudo, without allowing them to use sudo generally, you can add the following two lines to your /etc/sudoers file using visudo:

User_Alias      AEGIRUSERS = comma, seperated, list, of, users
AEGIRUSERS      ALL = (aegir) ALL

If you want to allow these users to use aegir without entering a password, simply change the second line to this:

AEGIRUSERS      ALL = (aegir) NOPASSWD:ALL