Class server
Check your access
Generate your keys
The config file
A note on GitHub keys
Customization
1. Even better
Need software?

Class server

To help you do your labs, we have set up each with an individual virtual machine running on the Rose-Hulman cluster. You can view your virtual machines assginment on the spreadsheet on Moodle.

On the spreedsheet, you will see that your login is always csse. Each virtual machine has a default password (listed in the spreadsheet) that you can use to login the first time. After your first login, you will be asked to change your password to protect your access to the virtual machine.

If you are off-campus, you will need to be on the campus virtual private network (VPN) to be able to access the server. Please see the EIT documentation for how to set up your VPN access.

Your servers perform daily backup at night. If at any point in time you seem to have things broken, please do let me know asap so we can recover your last backup.

Check your access

First, try to login to the server and make sure that you are able to see your home directory. As a generic case, I will assume to be using 490-01.csse.rose-hulman.edu as my virtual machine, but please replace it with your own virtual machine FQDN in the below instructinos.

To do so, use the following:

  $ ssh csse@490-01.csse.rose-hulman.edu

If you can login successfully, check your home directory.

  $ echo $HOME

And you should see your home directory look like /home/csse/.

Generate your keys

To avoid having to constantly type your password to login, let’s set you up with a public/private keypair for authentication on the server.

Generate a public/private keypair

If you already have generated a public/private keypair for any other purpose before, then you can skip this section.

If not, then do the following (on your local Linux machine, not on the server!).

  $ ssh-keygen

Choose the default directory, and then select a passphrase to protect your key (you can elect to leave it blank if you’d like).

Check that your key exists by reading the public key:

  $ cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

You should see a bunch of nonsense show up on your screen.

If you are using a newer version of open-ssh, your default key generation will use a different algorithm. So your public key might be named something like id_ed25519.pub. Please use whatever public key you were able to generate.

Copy keys to server

Now, copy your public key to the class server using:

  $ ssh-copy-id csse@490-01.csse.rose-hulman.edu

If you have multiple keys on your local machine, you might need to specify one to copy. You can use the -i switch with ssh-copy-id.

Now, try to login to the server again using

  $ ssh csse@490-01.csse.rose-hulman.edu

You should not be prompted for your password again.

The config file

Typing that long-ass server address every time you want to login to the server is tedious. Let’s do better and make it nice.

In an editor, on your local Linux machine, open the file ~/.ssh/config and add the following:

  Host netsec
    HostName 490-01.csse.rose-hulman.edu
    User csse

This basically let’s ssh know that netsec is an alias for our class server, at port 22, with your username. To verify that you can do things correctly, try:

  $ ssh netsec

You should now land in the class server, in your home directory, without any trouble.

A note on GitHub keys

You will be doing much of your editing on the class server, so it might be worth it to generate a public/private keypair to use with GitHub for authentication. Please checkout the official GitHub documentation for more information, but here’s a quick summary.

On the class server, while logged in:

Use ssh-keygen to generate a new pair of keys.
Use cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub to read your public key.
Copy the public key from the terminal window.
Add the public key to the list of ssh keys on your GitHub profile.

Now you can clone your private repositories and push to them from the class server.

Customization

I have set up all of the virtual machines with some customization options to help make your life easier in the class. You will be running zsh with a few plugins to help development and testing.

I have added custom configuration scripts for neovim, tmux, and zsh that get loaded by default. If you wish to turn off any of thease features, then please let me know and I can reset your environment.

I have also added a bunch of aliases that will prove to be useful when working with docker. We will reference those as we go along the labs.

Even better

To keep all of your configuration files in sync, I highly recommend that you take a look at homeshick. It is very versatile tool that allows you to preload your config file on every new machine within a couple of minutes.

Need software?

You will notice that you do not have privileged execution on the server (i.e., you cannot use sudo), and that is for good reason. If you require software to be installed that you cannot compile locally and append to your path, then please let me know as soon as possible and I will investigate our options. If everyone would benefit from the software, then we’ll probably install it server-wide. If it is only beneficial for you, then I will probably work with you on compiling it locally and updating your PATH variable.

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