Please note that all the SIEpedia's articles address specific issues or questions raised by IAC users, so they do not attempt to be rigorous or exhaustive, and may or may not be useful or applicable in different or more general contexts.

Work At Home 2

Continuation of our previous tutorial Work at Home.

For those who were at the talk, but could not write down all the details, I put here the configuration file for the tools that I mentioned in the talk.

Setting up the tunnels

• To work at home we first need to create a SSH connection with "tunnels" (see SSH Tunnelling if you are not familiar with SSH "tunnels"). At this talk we only used two tunnels: one for VNC and another one for the shh-related connections. In Linux we can create a .ssh/config file (with permissions set to 600) in our home directory with the following contents, but remember to change the config name to reflect your machine and your username:

 
Host iac-work
HostName vaso.ll.iac.es
     User angelv

#Port 22 (ssh,scp)
    LocalForward 10000 vaso:22

#VNC (5900 + servidor)
    LocalForward 5901 localhost:5901

• We then can connect to our IAC machine in the usual way: first with "telnet acceso.ll.iac.es", and then "ssh iac-work" (please note that iac-work is the name provided as Host in the config file, which is a sort of alias which defines the machine, the username and all the tunnels to set up). If accessing the IAC from an external account is new to you check the Instructions for External Accounts given by SIC to connect to the IAC from the outside world. Once we are in, then all the tunnels should be up.

VNC

• In your workstation you can start your vncserver with something like:

 
angelv@vaso:~$ vncserver  -geometry 1024x768

New 'vaso:1 (angelv)' desktop is vaso:1

Starting applications specified in /home/angelv/.vnc/xstartup
Log file is /home/angelv/.vnc/vaso:1.log

angelv@vaso:~$ 

• At home, in order to connect to this server via vncviewer, you will just need (once you have connected to the IAC and created the ssh tunnels) to run the command vncviewer, but the server, instead of vaso will be localhost:1.

Screen

For this, you don't need any ssh tunnels. At you workstation, just run screen (or byobu if you have it installed). The first time this will create the server and will connect to it. Use it as a standard terminal, with the exception that you can kill it any time you want. From another machine you can reattach to it by just connecting to the workstation where you started the screen server, and by running screen -D -R

Transferring files with FileZilla

If using a SFTP client (like FileZilla), and given that you have created the tunnels as above. You can create a new connection to your workstation files by configuring a new site, where the name of the host is localhost and the port is 10000.

Mounting a remote directory locally with sshfs

Similar to the configuration of FileZilla above, but more convenient. You can create an empty directory named IAC in your remote machine, and mount the home directory of your IAC workstation with the command:

 
sshfs angelv@localhost:/home/angelv/ /home/angelv/IAC -p 10000
 

This will allow you to work with all your workstations files as if they were local to your remote machine.

Section: Tutorials and Manuals