This is part of the Semicolon&Sons Code Diary - consisting of lessons learned on the job. You're in the unix category.
Last Updated: 2024-11-21
On EC2 I was having trouble getting a systemctl command to work.
I ran
systemctl status ml-backend.service
and it asked me for a password for the default ubuntu user. However there was no password since ec2 used a key pair and password based login was disabled.
The solution was to run the whole command again with sudo in front:
sudo systemctl status ml-backend.service
This is counter-intuitive, since on my development machine, prepending sudo asks for a password - whereas here it skips it.
What's happening?
- The command systemctl was asking for ubuntu's password. But it has no password, therefore it always fails.
- When I prepend with sudo I get to skip the usual asking for passwords, since it is using my key instead.