Secure Shell (ssh)

Important

• You have to enable your account for remote ssh with CipConf.
• Dont use the remote/ssh/rdp hosts for compute jobs. Please use Slurm or jump ssh to a normal computer. Please read our rules for compute jobs. (For a list of computers see below)

Infos

SSH stands for secure shell and provides an encrypted connection to the computers of the university. With it you can initiate a console session secured against eavesdropping to our computers from anywhere in the world. Additionally SSH not only securely encrypts the datastream but also compresses it.

Users who have not used remote.cip.ifi.lmu.de before need to enable their SSH access through the CipConf form (Remote Enabler). The server pool constituting remote.cip.ifi.lmu.de is meant only for simple interactive console sessions. Long running and/or resourceintensive processes are forbidden on these machines and will be terminated without warning. For such jobs connect to a normal CIP-Pool computer via SSH.

Two things need to be considered with this service. Firstly the SSH Servers follow our normal once weekly reboot cycle. A session does not survive a reboot. Secondly several servers hide behind the DNS name remote.cip.ifi.lmu.de. New sessions are assigned to a random server.

Please do not use the real names of the servers for connections if you do not need to resume a suspended session because the load balancing provided by the random allocation of sessions to servers is essential for a continous opperation of this service.

SSH clients are provided by all major opperating systems (Linux, Windows 10, MacOs).

Tips:

• A typical ssh command to connect to remote.cip.ifi.lmu.de would look like this in a shell.

    ssh <username>@remote.cip.ifi.lmu.de
  

• To use services limited to the network of the institute or on non remote hosts you can use a so-called SSH tunnel/port forwarding.

• In addition to the interactive shell SSH also allows you to copy files (scp/sftp) or run commands directly on the remote servers.

• In addition to password authentication SSH allows authentication via keys. This is more secure and convenient in most cases.

• Tools like screen and tmux are helpfull in mitigating network problems and/or runing longtime compute tasks.

• For a list of non used hosts (slurm) you can use the command “sinfo”.