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. (The default algorithm is simply "round-robin".)

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 -- this the HAproxy related Timeout regarding the TCP connection
Kerberos/OpenAFS have separate/shorter timeouts. You need to kinit && aklog after timeout.

Availability

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

Some technical details

The six currently implemented virtual machines offer:

6 GiB Ram
Quad Core CPU
these VMs are placed into the computer pool network. This makes sure users have exactly the same experience as if being physically present in the pool

All of this is run off of one virtualization Host

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! -- currently in BETA

Links

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