Setting up Access to the Argonne ELabs Machines

In order to work on the machines in the Argonne ELabs cluster (except www13^*), you have to use ssh keys to connect first to the MCS login service, and then go on from there to the machine you wish to work on. It is possible to go directly through the login service using the -o ForwardAgent argument to ssh.

Here is how to set up any of the ELabs machines to use the same authorized_keys file you already have on the login server (terra, harley, or shakey). We will use terra in the examples below.

First, on terra, make sure that your public ssh key for terra is in the authorized_keys file on terra. If it is not, you can easily do so with

        cd .ssh
        cat id_rsa.pub >> authorized_keys

If you have a DSS key rather than an RSS key then the name of the public key file will be id_dsa.pub. Be sure to use double >> or you will overwrite the authorized_keys file rather than appending to it.

Next, use ssh-copy-id to distribute your public key to other computers. By default, it will chose id_rsa.pub; see the man pages for more details on how to choose specific keys to send.

        ssh-copy-id www13.i2u2.org

Repeat for any other machines that you want access to.

You also need to request that Mike Wilde make sure you are in the quarknet group and also the sudoers group for that machine. He has to ask systems people to handle this because it gets overridden if he does it manually.

(Q: can you request the group via the Unix Permission Groups page on MCS Accounts?)

^*The machine www13.i2u2.org currently allows direct connections from an external site, using either an ssh key or your Argonne MCS password.

-- Main.LizQuigg - 24 May 2007
-- Main.EricMyers - 29 May 2007
-- Main.PhongNguyen - 16 Dec 2008