Remotely working with CSIL via SSH from Windows

This tutorial shows how to connect to CSIL server from Windows via SSH. The main pre-requisite is to have a College of Engineering account, which can be created and managed at https://accounts.engr.ucsb.edu/. We will also need a couple of tools. To access CSIL using command-line interface (CLI), we'll need PuTTY — a free SSH client for Windows. In order to run GUI applications and forward GUI to our display, we'll need Xming — a free X11-server (Xming itself, Xming fonts).

Accessing CSIL via SSH

Working with CSIL using CLI is quite easy:

1) Run PuTTY and type the address of the remote host in "Host Name" textbox (in our case, the host name is csil.cs.ucsb.edu). Use the default port 22. Afterwards, click "Open".



2) When asked, type in your login and password, which correspond to your College of Engineering account.



3) Now you should be logged in and able to work with CLI.



4) To terminate the session, execute exit command

Using X11-forwarding

You may want to run some GUI applications on CSIL server (e.g. Matlab or Tau profiler). In order to do it, you will need to run an X11-server and enable X11 forwarding in PuTTY:

1) Run Xming 

%PROGRAMFILES%\Xming\Xming.exe -clipboard -multiwindow


As a result, Xming server's icon should appear in the tray.



2) Run PuTTY and specify the hostname as it has been done previously.

3) In the menu on the left, in the section Connection->SSH->X11, choose "Enable X11 forwarding". Afterwards, click "Open" and log in using your credentials.



4) Now you can run GUI applications, e.g., gedit or nautilus:





5) To terminate session, execute exit. If PuTTY hangs, close Xming, and PuTTY will close.


Victor Amelkin, Sep 30, 2012