CSIL: via ssh from Windows

Connecting via PuTTY/XMing or MobaXterm

To connect to the CSIL machines from Windows, you need a piece of software known as an ssh client

Goodbye PuTTY/XMing, Hello MobaXTerm

The most commonly used ssh client in the past has been a program called PuTTY.

PuTTY works fine for any program that doesn’t use graphics. However, to access the graphics capabilities of the CSIL machines, you also need a piece of software known as an X11 server, such as XMing.

Configuring PuTTY and XMing to work together can be tedious. Why bother, when there is now a free program that combines both, called MobaXTerm.

You can download MobaXterm from this link: http://mobaxterm.mobatek.net/

How to use MobaXTerm to connect to CSIL

Once you have downloaded it, you want to use it to create a new session. The demo shown at this link pretty much illustrates the process.

• Click “new session”
• Select “ssh”
• For “remote host”, instead of 192.168.56.86 you’ll enter csil-15.cs.ucsb.edu (actually, instead of 15, choose any number between 01 and 48).
• For “username”, instead of root, you’ll enter your CSIL username.
• The first time you connect to a particular system, you may be asked
• It should then prompt you for your password. (I do not recommend “saving the password”.)

SSH Port Forwarding

When you want to access a localhost:8080 web app running on CSIL from a non-CSIL computer, e.g. your laptop

At a command prompt (terminal prompt on MacOS, Linux, WSL, Windows 10, or git bash shell on Windows), you can type this:

ssh -L 8080:localhost:8080 username@csil-xx.cs.ucsb.edu

where:

• username is your actual CSIL username
• xx is some number between 01 and 48

That will set up port 8080 on your local machine as a tunnel to “localhost:8080” on the CSIL machine. Then, if you put localhost:8080 in your browser, you should be getting access to localhost:8080 on the CSIL machine you are ssh’ing into.