Setup your SSH access

Please go through the following procedure to set up your SSH access to your group servers.

  1. Generate your SSH key-pair by ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096. For more, refer to https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ssh/.

  2. Contact your server admin and send him/her your SSH pub key ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub, to set up your SSH pub key for authentication. (WARNING: DO NOT send your private key ~/.ssh/id_rsa and keep it safe!)

  3. Edit ~/.ssh/config to configure your SSH connection for convenience (not necessary, but help you to avoid typing the long IPs every time). For other servers, refer to Section Available servers.

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    Host YOUR_SERVER_ID
    Hostname YOUR_SERVER_IP
    User YOUR_SERVER_USER
    Port YOUR_SERVER_PORT

    where YOUR_SERVER_ID is any name you choose, e.g. mylab; YOUR_SERVER_IP is the global IP or domain name your server; YOUR_SERVER_USER is the login user on your server; and YOUR_SERVER_PORT is the port number your server set to offer SSH (or TCP) service.

  4. Once you got confirmed with key setup from your admin, you now can access SSH server by ssh YOUR_SERVER_ID.

Warning: The insecure login via password to SSH servers will be completely invalidated soon!

How to run and connect to Jupyter Notebook on a remote SSH server

  1. SSH connect to remote server by ssh YOUR_SERVER_ID and insert your password (if you don’t use your SSH key authentication).

  2. On remote server, run the jupyter notebook web sever by jupyter notebook --no-browser.

  3. On your local machine, run ssh -NL 8888:localhost:8888 YOUR_SERVER_ID to build up a SSH tunneling to remote server.

  4. Use the URL localhost:8888 in your web browser (local machine) to access the Jupyter Notebook on the remote server.

Note: Variable YOUR_SERVER_ID can be the specific URLs of SSH servers (in next section), or any identifier names specified by your ~/.ssh/config.

Tips: You may add one more & at the end of the above commands in Step 2,3 to bring them to the background. It allows the command to keep running even when you log out or kill your terminal. To bring them to foreground (i.e. the normal running), use fg; to list the commands running in background, use bg.

Note: If you have altered the port number in your Jupyter config file (in ~/.jupyter/), e.g., 1224, you choose replace the 1st 8888 in Step 3 with 1224.

A demo to use an SSH server

Suppose that ~/.ssh/config has configured mylab. In terminals,

  1. (local machine) ssh mylab
  2. (remote server) jupyter notebook --no-browser &
  3. (local machine) ssh -NL 8888:localhost:8888 mylab &
  4. (local machine) web browser to open the URL: localhost:8888
  5. done! enjoy your Jupyter notebook :)

Tips: You may set aliases in your ~/.bashrc to accelerate your start every time. For example, in remote server, add alias jp="jupyter notebook --no-browser"; in local machine, add alias jp="ssh -NL 8888:localhost:8888 mylab &". Now you can just type jp twice (one in ssh-ed terminal, one in local**, and you have Jupyter Notebook in your local web browser to work with.

Alternative using 花生壳

The operations to setup ssh and access servers (step 1, 2) will be the same. The difference is that step 3,4 can be replaced by an automatic HTTP redirection service by 花生壳. In the console of 花生壳, let the HTTP map to 127.0.0.1:8888, i.e. localhost:8888 the default IP and port used by Jupyter notebook. Now once you run the Jupyter notebook on your server, you can open it via you local web browser using the URL provided by 花生壳.

Procedure:

  1. ssh your server (ssh mylab) and start Jupyter notebook (jp);
  2. open in web browser using the domain name from 花生壳.

Available servers

Private. Please contact your admin.