SSH & Student Accounts
SwayForm is planned to use two Linux access levels on the Raspberry Pi: a shared student account, and an administrator account for the instructor.
The shared student account
Students connect through a shared student SSH account. Instead of separate logins per student, everyone in a class reaches the same account and then creates a separately named project — see Student Projects — using a guided command-line tool.
Because every student project lives under one shared Linux account, this does not provide true operating-system-level isolation between students. Project names and optional project passwords are a SwayForm classroom-organization feature — they discourage accidental modification and help students find their own work again. They are not a security boundary against a technically advanced student with access to the same shared filesystem, and ROS 2 itself has no concept of a "password-protected package."
The administrator account
The instructor holds an administrator account with elevated privileges. From it, an instructor can:
- View every queued student submission
- Identify the student or team
- Open and review submitted source code
- Review automated validation results
- Approve or reject a submission, with feedback
- Start or stop approved code
- Access system configuration and manage protected services
- Maintain the robot
See Validation & Queue for how a submission moves from student account to instructor review to the robot.