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05 Accessing SULIS from outside CU campus

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Alex Pedcenko (aa3025) edited this page Feb 7, 2024 · 12 revisions
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It is possible to login to sulis HPC e.g. from home computer.

  1. Your sulis account must contain the public ssh-key of a local machine in CU network. This is done during SAFE account creation. Let's say, when you created your SAFE account, you uploaded the public part of your personal ssh-key from Linux server linux.coventry.ac.uk (hypothetical server name here), which resides in CU network. You can already login to sulis from that server using your ssh-key saved on linux.coventry.ac.uk.

  2. Now you are outside CU network (e.g. at home) and can access/login via ssh to linux.coventry.ac.uk via CU VPN. Here we can use linux.coventry.ac.uk (or any other ssh server on CU campus you have access to) as a "Proxy" (a.k.a. JumpHost) for logging in to sulis. On your home PC, open your ssh config file ~/.ssh/config or create one if it does not exist. Put these lines there:

 Host proxy
 Hostname zeus.coventry.ac.uk
 User username_on_zeus_coventry_ac_uk

 Host sulis
 User username_on_sulis
 Hostname login.sulis.ac.uk
 ProxyJump proxy:22
 IdentityFile ~/.ssh/sulis/id_rsa

In the first stance [optional] we define what is the jumphost machine "proxy" (note that you can use IP address in Hostname field as well). In the second stance we define sulis machine, to be accessed via "proxy" jumphost. Last line (optional) also shows how to use non-default ssh public key generated and saved on host "proxy" in ~/.ssh/sulis/id_rsa.pub for sulis.

  1. If you created ~/.ssh/config on your home PC as a new file, you have to change its permissions to "read-only" (unless your home PC is a Windows machine and that's not important anyway).

FYI, on a Winodws system, your config file for ssh should be located in your home folder, e.g. c:/Users/Your Windows Username/.ssh/config (same folder where ssh-keys reside).

chmod 600 ~/.ssh/config
  1. If you also previously have set up password-less access to "proxy" jumphost from your home PC (i.e. using ssh-key as well), then when you type
ssh sulis

you will be seamlessly brought to sulis login prompt (e.g. asking for 2FA code).

  1. Similarly, you can copy files to/from sulis, initiating copy procedure from you home PC, e.g. using scp or rsync

Let's say I want to copy a folder "results" which reside in my home folder on sulis to my home folder on home PC:

scp -r sulis:~/results ~/

Or the other way around:

scp -r ~/my_files_to_copy_to_sulis sulis:~/