Off-Campus Access to Shared Computing Resources

Off-Campus Access to
Shared Computing Resources

15-May-2008

Introduction

Direct logins to our Shared Computing Resources from off-campus are prohibited. In order to login to these systems from off-campus, there are currently three methods as described below.

SSH Only

Rice faculty, staff, and students may login to our Shared Computing Resources from off-campus with SSH if they have SSH login access to another system on campus which allows off-campus access. This might be an office desktop system or a department server. If this is the case, then SSH login to one of those systems and SSH login to hostname.rice.edu from there. Thus it will be a two step process to login to these systems:

SSH login to anyhost.rice.edu from off-campus.
SSH login to hostname.rice.edu from anyhost.rice.edu where hostname.rice.edu is the name of the system you are logging in to.

SSH with VPN

Rice faculty, staff, and students may login to Shared Computing Resources from off-campus with SSH by connecting to the Rice network with VPN. VPN (Virtual Private Network) essentially makes the off-campus computer appear as if it were on the Rice network. In order to obtain a VPN account and software, please visit the Rice VPN web site. Thus it will be a two step process to login to these systems:

Connect to the Rice network with VPN using the off-campus computer.
SSH login to hostname.rice.edu from the off-campus computer where hostname.rice.edu is the name of the system you are logging in to.

SSH for Guests (no VPN)

People who have accounts on the Shared Computing Systems but are not affiliated with Rice (guest accounts) will likely not have SSH or VPN access to the Rice network. In these cases a special SSH Gateway account can be provided that will provide the same capability as the "SSH Only" section above. You can request this account when you apply for a guest account. When the account is created, you will receive instructions via email on how to use the account. If you already have an account and you decide later that you need an SSH Gateway account, please call the Help Desk at 713-348-4357 and submit a request. Using this account will mean that logging in to these systems will be a two-step process:

SSH login to gw.rcsg.rice.edu from off-campus.
SSH login to hostname.rice.edu from gw.rcsg.rice.edu where hostname.rice.edu is the name of the system you are logging in to.

For the latest information on the SSH Gateway access policy, please see our FAQ.

How to Transfer Files from Off-Campus

To transfer files from a Linux or Unix machine to the Shared Computing Resources, use the scp command. If you are using a VPN connection, then scp will work exactly as described in our SSH FAQ as if you were on campus.

If you are not using VPN and are using an intermediate Rice host or the SSH Gateway as described earlier, then there will be a two step process to transfer files to these systems:

Use scp to transfer files to anyhost.rice.edu or the SSH Gateway (gw.rcsg.rice.edu) from off-campus.
Use scp to transfer files from anyhost.rice.edu or the SSH Gateway (gw.rcsg.rice.edu) to hostname.rice.edu where hostname.rice.edu is the name of the system you are transferring to.

In both cases, scp will work as described in our SSH FAQ.

Note that if you are using the SSH Gateway for the file transfer process, your home directory on the SSH Gateway has a 250MB quota. If you need to transfer more than 250MB of data, please copy it to the /tmp directory on the SSH Gateway first. This location is a virtual disk, meaning that all contents will be automatically deleted if the system is rebooted. So please do not attempt to store data in this location permanently. It is for temporary storage of data for the purpose of transferring it to the Shared Computing Resources.

For the latest information on the SSH Gateway access policy, please see our FAQ.

For an advanced method for transferring large data sets, please see our FAQ.

More Information about SSH

For general instructions on how to use SSH, please see our SSH FAQ.