Remote Access to CITA


getting Internet service
mail settings
ssh access
ssh tunnelling
accessing bobMonitor from home
UTORvpn
remote desktops via VNC

getting internet service


Most CITAzens use either Sympatico from Bell (the phone company) or Rogers (cable). UofT staff and faculty are entitled to a 15% discount on Sympatico service. You can register for service online at the Sympatico website but first you will need a special UofT group key in order to get the discount. 

In the past, CITAzens made use of the Bell Megabit Access service in order to connect to the internet through the University of Toronto network and thereby access services that are usually restricted to the university community such as the Library's electronic journals. In early 2005 this was replaced with UTORvpn.

Mail Settings:

If you use a text-based mail client like pine or Eudora then all you ever need is a window that can login to CITA. If you're hooked on something like Thunderbird/Mozilla you'll have to do a bit of configuration.  See the Electronic Mail section of these pages.


Ssh access


Access CITA machines by using ssh to reach our gateway machine gw.cita.utoronto.ca (currently known as falcon but this could change without warning). Once logged on there you can ssh into any other CITA machine. See the section below on ssh tunneling to learn how to transparently access any CITA machine from outside.

Linux boxes should already have an ssh client installed. If your windows machine does not have ssh you can download the non-commercial SSHSecureShellClient (from www.ssh.com )  or download putty. Both of these have secure ftp-like clients as well for copying files and directories.

If one is using windows it is possible to forward graphical programs from cita linux workstations. Using VNC may provide less hassle (and better performance?) but one can also use XMing to set up an X-server in windows. Details of how to configure this can be found here.

Sometimes, when connecting to falcon, users will receive an error message that won't stop repeating itself ( " X11 auth data does not match fake data. ").  Unless you need X11 forwarding it is best to turn it off using the -x argument to ssh.  The command then takes the form "ssh -x username@falcon.cita.utoronto.ca".  Another work around for this is to open another terminal window and log into falcon again while the first is still running, you can then close the first window.

UTORvpn

Access to certain campus resources (such as Library online journals) is restricted to computers connected to the UofT network. For those who connect to the Internet through a commercial ISP, the VPN service allows you to establish a 'direct' connection to the UofT network. You must login to the VPN with your UTORid and password.

Your UTORid is the key to accessing many UofT services such as UTORvpn, UTORschedule, MyUtoronto and for downloading Norton AntiVirus.  The first step is to get the appropriate letter from Margaret and then get a library card by going to the Robarts Library (the peacock-shaped building just 1-2 blocks north of CITA at St. George and Harbord) .  Once you have the card you will be able to activate your UTORid and then register for UTORvpn.



Remote Desktops via VNC:

You can access your desktop from home using TightVNC.  The command to do this in linux is vncviewer -via username@falcon.cita.utoronto.ca machine:port_number where username is your login name, machine is the VNC server you wish to use and port_number is the display you wish to use.

For most users, the easiest way to do it is to connect to the servers on falcon or kodiak.  The following ports display the following resolutions:
Port:
 Resolution:
50
 1600x1200
51
 1280x1024
52
 1024x768

For example, if user foo wants to connect to kodiak from home at the resolution 1024x768, he would type: vncviewer -via foo@falcon.cita.utoronto.ca kodiak:52

Alternatively, you can make your own VNC server by logging into your favourite machine and typing vncserver and then connecting to the port number given to you.  Remember to kill your VNC servers after you're finished!  Just like any X server, they keep all your programs in memory until killed.



Anti-Virus:  All UofT faculty, staff and students are entitled to install Norton Anti-Virus (NAV) software on their windows machines.  Before you begin, you will need to get a UTORid (NOT the same thing as your UTORdial account above).  Then follow the NAV instructions


SSH Tunneling: 


What if you want to scp a file directly from your home machine to the scratch disk of kodiak? That looks like a problem because the outside world can not see kodiak. Similarly, bob runs a web server but the CITA firewall prevents outsiders from seeing it.

The way to get around such issues is to use ssh tunneling. As long as you can ssh to gw.cita.utoronto.ca you should be able to tunnel a connection to any other CITA machine via ssh. The following instructions assume that you're using a linux box at home. The same thing can be done from a windows machine by setting up tunneling in the ssh gui or by running cygwin and then doing the linux tricks below.

On your home machine issue the following command, login to the gateway machine and leave that window open:

 ssh -L 7777:kodiak:22  gw.cita.utoronto.ca

This effectively opens up a channel from port 7777 on your home machine to port 22 on kodiak. The 22 is a significant and necessary number because this is the port reserved for ssh  (i.e. you can now do scp & ssh directly to kodiak).  The choice of 7777 is NOT special - it just has to be in the range 1025-65535.

To actually use your ssh tunnel you can now do the following from your home machine:

ssh -p 7777 localhost   (log directly into kodiak from home)

scp -P 7777 junk1 localhost:/scratch/<username> (copies file junk1 from home machine to scratch on kodiak).

 rsync -avz -e "ssh -p 7777" localhost:/cita/h/home-1/<username>/STUFF  ~TEMP (rsyncs the directory STUFF from kodiak back to your home machine into directory  TEMP)

One thing to note is that ssh uses "-p" for port-forwarding whereas it's a capital letter with scp. You can combine multiple port connections in a single line; e.g.

 ssh -L 7777:kodiak:22 -L 5050:bob:80 gw.cita.utoronto.ca