Using SSH
When your SECS account is created, you are given a shell account on all of our UNIX servers.
To log in remotely from your home Windows machine, download putty.
Launch putty, and type login.secs.oakland.edu in as the Host Name, and select SSH as the protocol (if not already selected), then hit Open. You will be asked for a username and password, just provide your SECS credentials. You now have shell access to the SECS UNIX webservers.
Once you are into the SECS network, you may want to login from machine to machine. To do this, use the ssh command.
The ssh command syntax is ssh user@host, where user is your username, and host is the host you want to connect to. If you would like to forward X connections (have GUI programs launched on the remote host launch on your machine), use ssh -X user@host (see below).
So for example, if you want to connect to login, the command would be:
$ ssh yourusername@login
and from offcampus, you would need the full name
$ ssh yourusername@login.secs.oakland.edu
Graphical Applications
Occasionally, you may want to launch a program over ssh such as Matlab or Firefox that is graphical. If you are using a UNIX/Linux based system, this is easy, since Linux systems use X to display windows. To set it up so graphical applications launch on your local machines, use:
$ ssh -X yourusername@login.secs.oakland.edu
But most of us don't use Linux environments at home, so you need an ssh client to log in to our Linux machines. We recommend Putty. For more information on using Putty to run graphical applications visit the RemoteX page.
Tips for running long jobs
Your home directory is served out to all the servers over the network, as a result, if you are running a program that makes use of lots of files, sometimes the operation can become network bound instead of CPU bound. The directory /tmp is on a local disk, feel free to use it to dump data files on it if you feel that running your operation out of your home directory is too slow. NOTE: The /tmp directory is cleaned out on every reboot, the onus is on you to backup files that you place in there.
External links
IETF working group (for SSH-2)
Proxytunnel, another program, offers more generic capabilities.
autossh, Automatically restarts SSH sessions and tunnels]
