Accessing the NTG Lab via the Jump System

[scottalanmiller]

NTG Lab

One of the two main means of gaining access to the NTG Lab at this time is via a Linux Mint "Jump Station." This outward facing terminal server allows access solely through SSH in order to gain access to a platform inside of the NTG Lab network. From here, access to nearly all other resources can be established.

There are three basic needs that can be addressed by the jump box:

• Direct SSH Access to SSH enabled machines (primarily UNIX)
• Direct HTTP/HTTPS Access via Web Browser
• RDP Redirect as a second stage for Windows desktop clients

All access is via SSH. Desktop graphical resources are available via the NX protocol through the SSH tunnel for security. It is recommended that for security reasons, you set up SSH keys to both speed, and secure access to your account on the Jump Server. If you are logging in from Windows, PuTTY would normally be used. If you are going to access the server from Linux, BSD, Mac OSX or other non-Windows system you would use the integrated terminal emulator.

For accessing graphical resources, such as Firefox or a complete desktop experience, the preferred tool is X2Go which is available for most platforms. If you are on Windows or Mac OSX, you will need to download X2Go for your platform. Windows users can access X2Go from Chocolatey. If you are on a Linux system, check your system repositories as X2Go's client is often included for the platform.

You will need to get the server name, username, password (or key) and port number for X2Go from me (Scott) in order to access the Jump Server.

In X2Go, you can use the LXDE desktop option to receive an entire Linux desktop experience (which will be pretty slow). Or you can choose a "single application" option in order to have a faster experience.

In order to get a web browser, use: /usr/bin/firefox

In order to use the robust remote access client Remmina, use: /usr/bin/remmina

These options should provide essentially any remote access option that you would need. If you need other application utilities, you can put them into the "single application" dialogue. For example, launching HexChat would just be /usr/bin/hexchat

This provides access to resources running on the NTG Scale cluster and elsewhere.