Login to ALICE using PowerShell

Prerequisites

For Windows 10 build 1809 and higher, OpenSSH is available for PowerShell. This allows you to use PowerShell to connect to ALICE using ssh without any additional third-party tools for most purposes.

Check if you already have OpenSSH installed, by opening PowerShell and type

ssh -V

This should show someting like OpenSSH_for_Windows_7.7p1, LibreSSL 2.6.5. If it does not work, then install OpenSSH for PowerShell before continuing.

Known issues

There are three main limitations to using ssh with PowerShell.

# You cannot do X11 forwarding without an additional third-party tool.
# You cannot use the ProxyJump setting, but ProxyCommand works.
# The command ssh-copy-id is not available.

Setting up your ssh connection

You can set up your ssh connection to ALICE in a very similar way to Linux. While PowerShell has its own command syntax and names, there are alias for the most common Linux-type commands and we will use these from here on.

Open PowerShell and go to your HOME directory on Windows (C:\Users\<YOUR_WINDOWS_USERNAME>):

cd $HOME

or use the Windows Explorer

Check if you have a directory called .ssh in your HOME. If not, create one. You can use mkdir .ssh in PowerShell.

Change into the directory .ssh and create a file config. Since PowerShell does not have a way of directly editing text files, you need to use another text editor of your choice for this.

In your text editor, add the ssh configuration settings described here: SSH tunneling for older versions of OpenSSH

Add monitoring tools in PowerShell

Just like on Linux, it is possible to setup your ssh connection so that you can access cluster monintoring tools. Simply add the settings described here: Add monitoring tools on Linux

Once connected you should be able to access the cluster monitoring in your browser just like this: Accessing monitoring tools on Linux

Password-less login with ssh keys in PowerShell

Password-less login with ssh keys is possible with PowerShell. However, the procedure is slightly different from Linux because the command ssh-copy-id is not available.

First create a set of ssh keys using ssh-keygen.exe in PowerShell.

Once you have a set of keys, you need to copy them manually to the ssh gateway and one of the login nodes. To this purpose, follow the steps described here: