SSH

A special post just for our beloved first-year students at UvA :).

It might well happen that you're at home and while having a beer with your dad (or anyone else) you remember you forgot to e-mail your assignment you was working on to yourself. Trouble. You just planned to finish your assignment tonight, but now you left everything you did at the university!

Well, I got some good news for ya: SSH.

On any Linux-pc with a working internet connection, just open a shell and type:

ssh user@host

to open a secured remote shell (where user has to be the user to log in on the remote pc, and host has to be the address of the remote pc).

In case of the University of Amsterdam, user will be your science-account, and host will be sremote.science.uva.nl, so:

ssh scienceaccount@sremote.science.uva.nl

After connecting (this will take about half a minute) you'll be welcomed by the FNWI welcome screen, and asked for your password. While you type in your password, the cursor will NOT move - this is default on UNIX shells.

After logging in, you'll get your bash shell and can access all your files directly. However, the policy of the sremote server requires us to ssh from there to a physical pc - no calculations are allowed at the sremote server (some people have been banned for that).

So, after logging in, choose a pc (ow124, ow125, .. ow141 and so on) and type:

ssh ow124

(because you are already logged in, your current username will be used, and because you're on an internal network you don't have to specify a domain name or something).

From that on, you can perform everything you can on a UvA-PC. Even running graphical programs (nautilus, firefox, try it!).

If the graphical part doesn't work, give SSH the parameter -X (capital x). This will enable X forwarding.

If you're in a Gnome Desktop Environment, you can also select "Connect to Server.." from the "Places" menu. Login credentials:
Service type: SSH
Server: sremote.science.uva.nl
Port: (default, leave empty)
Folder: (default, leave empty)
User name: Your science account user name
Name to use for connection: Be creative :).

After clicking "connect" you will be asked for your password. Now you have your SSH connection integrated in Nautilus!