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Connect to VM

Connecting to your virtual machines

There are different ways to interact with your virtual machines (VM):

  1. with a web interface (HTTP) with web-enabled cloud appliances, for example RStudio, Jupyter Notebooks;
  2. with the SSH command line interface (CLI) through a terminal window;
  3. with a remote graphical desktop (X2Go or VNC).

Once the deployment of your VM is done successfully, you can get all connection parameters from the column Access in the myVM tab of the biosphere portal. You will find the HTTP/S link (if any) to your VM, or the SSH parameters (username and IP address) to use to connect to your VM.

1. Connecting to a VM with a web interface

Simply click on the HTTPS link to be redirected to the web portal provided by your VM. In the case you are requested to provide the username and password, or the access token, they are provided through the parameters field Params in the Access column. These security parameters are unique for your VM and only known to you (and of course to the administrators of your group and of the cloud site for operationnal reasons).

2. Connecting to a VM with SSH

An SSH client is installed by default in any computer with Linux (CentOS, Ubuntu, Debian,...), MacOS (doc) and MS Windows 10 (and higher).

From MS Windows 10 release, you can use both the PowerShell (doc) or the WSL - Windows Subsystem Linux - based on Ubuntu (doc).

Configuring your SSH parameters in your Biosphere profile

First, you need to configure your SSH parameters before creating a VM with SSH access. Indeed your SSH PubKey will be imported in your VM at its creation, and cannot be modified afterwards.

1. Get your SSH PubKey

Open a terminal window (Linux, MacOS) or a PowerShell (MS Windows) and type the following command.

cat $HOME/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

If you got an empty answer, you do not have already a SSH keys pair, and you can create one with the following command.

Warning

If you have already a SSH key pair, you risk overwriting it with this new command.

ssh-keygen -t rsa
2. Open your account parameters page

They are available from the user menu in the top-right corner of the Biopshere portal [go].

3. Click the Edit button.
4. Copy your SSH public key in the Pubkey field.

You can paste several public keys but be careful that each one is on one line only.

Opening the SSH connection to the VM

To connect to a VM with SSH, you will need to

  • open the VM description page by clicking on its ID link in the Biosphere dashboard myVM,
  • in the VM page, copy the ssh command from the table Access,
  • paste the copied text in a terminal (Linux, MacOS) or a PowerShell window (MS Windows),
  • and hit return.

The connection will be established according to the SSH public key you configured in your profile (see above).

You can also click on the ssh link in the Biosphere dashboard to open a new terminal with an automatic SSH connection to your VM. (But this will work only with MacOS and most Linux.)

3. Connecting to a VM with a virtual remote desktop

You can connect to a desktop VM in two different ways, with X2Go or with VNC.

Opening a remote desktop requires to have both

  • configured your SSH parameters (see above),
  • and installed the X2Go or a VNC client and dependencies (see below).

Warning

With recent version of Ubuntu, there is a known bug with the X2Go desktop related to the compatibility of the X2Go server with the GLX library. So if you encounter some troubles with X2Go, you should perfer a connection with VNC

Connecting to a desktop VM with X2Go

1. Install the X2Go client

X2Go download instructions - chapter X2Go Client.

2. Install the X server software
  • [MacOS] : Xquartz (https://www.xquartz.org/)
  • [MS Windows 10] : VcXsrv (https://sourceforge.net/projects/vcxsrv) or Xming (https://sourceforge.net/projects/xming/)

Linux distributions have usually an X server installed by default.

3. Open the remote desktop connection to the VM

You can get the connection parameters of the VM in the Params fields of the column Access (in the myVM tab):

  • username
  • IP/hostname of the VM
  • session type (usually XFCE)

Then, you will use them to configure a session in the X2Go client (see X2Go usage instructions). And do not forget to check the box for Automatic authentication (with SSH agent or default key)

Connecting to a desktop VM with VNC

You can use any VNC client, for example the TigerVNC one (https://tigervnc.org) (download the latest release).

1. Connect to your VM with SSH

ssh -L 5901:localhost:5901 ubuntu@<vm-ip>

(Valid for Ubuntu VM, replace ubuntu by debian or rocky according to the VM you are running)

2. Once connected to your VM, launch the VNC server

vncserver -localhost yes -autokill no -SecurityTypes None

3. Verify that the service is running

vncserver -list

4. Connect to the desktop

On your local computer, open the TigerVNC client, and fill in the window the parameter VNC server with the value localhost:5901.