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👥 Collaborate and Share

The HBS Grid is a multi-user environment shared by many people. Because of this you must take care to ensure that only authorized project members can access your files.

Projects and group membership

For more information about storage options refer to the file transfer documentation.

For collaborative projects in which more than one person needs access, you must use a project space (request one if needed). Each project has an associated group that includes the HBS Grid users who have access to that project space. Changing group membership must currently be done by a system administrator; use the change request form to request a change.

File ownership and permissions

For project space files you will almost always want group members to have read and write permission. You can view and set permissions using the File Browser or from the command line using the Terminal.

Set permissions using the file browser

Follow these steps to change file permissions using the Files application

  1. Open the Files application from the Applications menu or Activites search
  2. Locate the file or folder you wish to modify, right-click on it and select Properties
  3. Select the Permissions tab in file properties dialog
  4. If you wish to change permissions for all files in a directory, click the Change Permissions for Enclosed Files button.
  5. Select appropriate access levels for Owner (you), Group, and Others.

Click the image below to see these steps visually:

Refer to the official GNOME documentation for details.

Set ownership and permissions using the command line

Ownership and permissions can alternatively be set from the command line using chown and chmod. For example 

chmod -R g+rwx project1/data
says "Recursively for group members, add read, write and execute permissions to project1/data and everything in it". Refer to tldr chmod for more permissions examples and to man chmod for details.

Group ownership can be set from the command line using chgrp. For example opening the Terminal application and running 

chgrp -R my_project_group project1/data
says "Recursively make my_project_group the group owner of project1/data and everything in it". Refer to tldr chgrp for more examples and to man chgrp for details.

Avoid running services other users can access

Some applications are designed to run as local servers that you connect to using a web browser or other client. On a single-user machine that may be relatively safe, but in a multi-user environment you need to take extra care to ensure that you don't start services that other users on the HBS Grid can connect to.

For example, running an unprotected Jupyter notebook can give other users the ability to connect to your service and execute arbitrary commands as you! Fortunately jupyter notebooks are token protected by default, and you can password protect them if you wish. The key thing is that you must be aware of any services you are running and you must understand how those services are protected against unwanted access by other users on the HBS Grid. The simple rule is if you don't know if or how a service is protected, don't use it!