Login to cluster

To login to the ALICE cluster you need to perform a hop-like login sequence. The two login node of the ALICE cluster cannot be accessed directly. So one needs to first login to an ssh gateway and then to one of the login nodes. This mechanism is required for both login and file transfer operations. Below we describe how to perform these actions from Linux and Windows, separately,

Login to ALICE from Linux

The login nodes are named:

login1.alice.leidenuniv.nl (10.161.0.12)
login2.alice.leidenuniv.nl (10.162.0.13)

Setup ssh JUMP

In your linux server write in ~/.ssh/config for instance

Host hpc1 
  HostName login1.alice.universiteitleiden.nl
  User <USERNAME>
  ProxyJump <USERNAME>@ssh-gw.leidenuniv.nl:22
  
Host hpc2
  HostName login2.alice.universiteitleiden.nl
  User <USERNAME>
  ProxyJump <USERNAME>@ssh-gw.leidenuniv.nl:22

(put in your own ulcn account name instead of <USERNAME>).

If you want to look at the monitoring tools that are running on the management node too, you could add additional tunneling commands to the config for a specific host. Do not add tunnels to all definitions as they may produce conflicts when you use the samen tunnel twice. So add the tunnel commands, for instance, to one host like:

Host hpc1tunnel
  HostName login1.alice.universiteitleiden.nl
  User <USERNAME>
  ProxyJump <USERNAME>@ssh-gw.leidenuniv.nl:22
  LocalForward 8081:management.alice.universiteitleiden.nl:8081
  LocalForward 8080:management.alice.universiteitleiden.nl:443

Alternatively, if your openssh server isn't that recent and doesn't recognize the ProxyJump alias, try this:

Host hpc1 
  HostName login1.alice.universiteitleiden.nl
  ForwardX11 yes
  User <USERNAME>
  ProxyCommand ssh -X <USERNAME>@sshgw.leidenuniv.nl -W %h:%p

Login to ssh-gw.leidenuniv.nl (ssh <USERNAME>@ssh-gw.leidenuniv.nl) and put your public key in

~/.ssh/authorized_keys

Login through to the HPC login1 node ''ssh login1.alice.universiteitleiden.nl' and put the same public key in

~/.ssh/authorized_keys

Direct login to login node 1

 ssh hpc1

and you can even forward X11 now.

File transfer to login node 1

 ssh <local_file_name> hpc1:<remote_file_name>

this copies the <local_file_name> file to <remove_file_name> file in your home directory on ALICE.