SSH Access to Friend Center 010

You can work on the projects from home, without installing a lot of software on your machine. To do so, you will need to secure shell into the Friend center lab. By enabling X11 forwarding, you will be able to run programs on those machines, but they will appear to be running on your PC.

For security reason, Princeton has imposed various firewall rules, which affect which computers can directly connect to others. This presents a mild obstacle to connecting to the Friend center lab.

Step-by-Step guide

  1. In order to login to the Friend center machines, you need to enable your OIT Unix account and have configured a login shell for your OIT Unix account. Information for the guest students is here.
  2. If you are using Mac OS X or windows, start your X11 server. Windows users: you could use Exceed, Xming, or cygwin as an X11 server. If you are a grad student in CS, the department has a copy of Exceed for you. Please stop by CS Building 101 to borrow the copy. Also, windows users will need to install an SSH client.
  3. Skip this step if you are within CS network
    Log in to a proxy server using your OIT account and password. Use the -X flag to enable X11 forwarding.
    home$ ssh -X username@labpc-proxy.cs.princeton.edu
  4. From the proxy server (or from your localhost if you are within CS network), log in to a lab machine using your OIT account and password. Use the -X flag for X11 forwarding. We have 20 machines in the fishbowl lab.
    portal$ ssh -X fc010-labpc-xx.cs.princeton.edu
    Where xx is a two-digit number between 01 and 23. Please try to select one of the lab machines randomly, as to distribute student load.
  5. Once you have logged in, determine if many other people have chosen that same computer. If you see more than 4 other people on that machine, I recommend that you log out and try a different lab PC. If you find that the machines are really busy, you can run the identical system of fishbowl machines on VirtualBox.
    labpc-xx$ w
  6. Finally, try to run a program such as xeyes to verify that X11 forwarding is working properly.
    labpc-xx$ xeyes &