Shell

Preliminary information! Does not work as intended yet. Will reboot often!

Usage

Simply use SSH to login to this machine:

ssh  user@shell.stud.informatik.uni-goettingen.de

Note that the intially presented banner contains something like

#######  shell.stud.informatik.uni-goettingen.de - login vm: shell5.cip.loc

...telling you the actual local name of the automatically chosen destination machine.

For Windows: use PuTTY (simple) or Cygwin (more complex and powerful) or any other SSH-implementation.

Target audience

These machines are meant to be used by students. But of course they can be used by any staff members! For new users the only requirement is to logon one single time using one of the (physical) pool computers - this will make them "known" to our systems.

Legacy login

Both login.stud.informatik.uni-goettingen.de and login.informatik.uni-goettingen.de are not affected by this new approach. They "old" machines will continue to work unmodified.

Timeout

The session Timeout is set to 36 hours

Availability

Take a look at: http://shell.stud.informatik.uni-goettingen.de/ -- use ifi/ifi to login ("bots not welcome")

What to expect

Some technical details:

The six currently implemented machines offer

6 GiB Ram
Quad Core CPU

the virtual gateway machine is running HAproxy. This is the only machine with a "real" IP-address.
several shellX.cip.loc-machines are placed into the computer pool network. This is required to have exactly the same experience as if being physically present in the pool
all machines are virtual instances on one single host, the host has
- 128 GiB ECC Ram
- dual Xeon CPU
- 600 GB Raid1 local disk
- 10 GBit/s networking :-)

Tips 'n' Tricks

Connect to the same machine again

Circumventing the Round-Robin mechanism is possible: connect to a specific port 42000+n withh n={1..6} :-)

For maschine number 4:

~$ ssh -p 42004 username@shell.stud.informatik.uni-goettingen.de
#######
#######  shell.stud.informatik.uni-goettingen.de - login vm: shell4.cip.loc

Todo

Monitoring
Documentation
Testing

Links

https://help.ubuntu.com/ -- common help regarding Ubuntu
http://shell.stud.informatik.uni-goettingen.de/ -- current state