School of Physics Support Team (SoPST)
The Support Team is located in the Howey Physics Building in room S101. Please submit your support requests via e-mail to support [at] physics.gatech.edu including as much detailed information as possible. One of the Team members will reply to your request as soon possible.
SSH Tunneling through Buzzframe
Tunneling through buzzframe is relatively easy. Once you have a secure connection you can copy(via scp), control your desktop, etc. Since most users want to connect to their desktops, this document will address just that.
Windows:
What you’ll need: VNC viewer/server, putty.
1. The first step is to download and install winVnc on the computer you wish to connect to. This is not too difficult. Simply point a browser to www.realvnc.com and download the installer. After installing it, be sure that your firewall is accepting connections from buzzframe on port 5800(this is the port that VNC uses). If you are using zonealarm then the first time you start the server it will ask you if you want to allow the service to run. Click yes. Set the password. Configuration of the computer you will connect to is now finished.
2. Now, in order to connect through buzzframe, you will need vncviewer and putty on your machine.
a. Start putty. You will get a screen that looks like this:
b. In the host name field, type “buzzframe.physics.gatech.edu” and make
sure that SSH is selected.
c. Click on SSH\Tunnels. You will get this screen:
d. On this screen, you will want to check “Enable X11 forwarding, and
“Remote ports do the same(SSH v2 only).
e. Now you will need to forward ports. In the “Source port” field, type
any port number that is not occupied. In this example, we are going to
use port 6900. Now, in the “Destination” field, type the name of the
machine you want to connect to followed by a colon, and then 5900. After
you have done this, click the “Add” button. If everything has been typed
correctly, you will have a screen that looks like this:
f. Once you do this, go back to the “Session” option and click “Open”. Once you do this, a black window. Type your buzzframe login ID and your password. If you logged in correctly, you should get a putty screen that looks like this:
g. Once you’ve done this, its time to start VNCviewer. When you start it, type “localhost:6900” into the server field. It should look like this:
h. If everything is configured correctly, you will get a window asking for your password. Type the password you set when you installed VNCserver and you will now have access to your desktop.
i. In order to allow scp, you will need another tunnel. To do this, restart putty, and again, go to the “SSH\Tunnels” menu. This time, add another tunnel, type 6922 in the local field, and in the destination field, type the name of the machine followed by a colon and the number 22. If done right, you should see something like this:
j. Again, press the open button and connect to buzzframe. From here, start your favorite SCP program(we’ll use winscp for this example) and connect it to the server “localhost” and use port “6922” or whatever you typed above. The screen will look like this in winscp:
k. Click login after you type your username and password. You will then be able to connect to your computer behind the firewall and scp files from it.
Unix
1. Fortunately, in order to export your desktop, you already have all the software that you need. Simply follow these step-by-step instructions to export your desktop through the firewall.
a. In order to forward only X connections, just add –X after the ssh command.
2. If you want to tunnel to another machine behind the firewall, you will need to add a few settings. If you want to scp, you would do the following:
ssh –L2020:computer_to_scp_to:22 username@buzzframe.physics.gatech.edu
3. Once you do this, you will be able to scp files. To scp, instead
of scp-ing from the remote host, you are now scp-ing through a tunnel on
your machine, specifically, port 2020. What the line above does is map a
local port(in this case 2020) to the computer’s port that you want to
tunnel to.
4. To scp files, you will use the following syntax:
scp –P 2020 localhost:/your/path/to/a/file .
5. In order to cut back on typing and to avoid confusion, several gui options are available. Programs like gFTP are rather straightforward and allow connection through any port.
MAC OS X
What you need: you can do it one of two ways:
1. The above way,
through the command line.
2. Using Fugu, a nice scp/ssh/sftp frontend.
If you are using Fugu:
1. Start fugu.
2. Go to the SSH pulldown and select “New SSH tunnel”
3. In the “Create Tunnel to:” field, type the name of the machine you
need to tunnel to.
4. In the “local port” field, type any number you want, above 1024.
5. In the “remote port” field, type the port you need to tunnel to.
6. In the “remote host” field, type the name of the computer you want to
tunnel to.
7. Click “Start Tunnel”.
8. At this point, you will connect via scp using the still open fugu.
You should have a screen that looks like this:
9. Once you are here, in the “connect to” field, you will type “localhost”, and in the port field, you will type the local port you typed into the tunnel screen earlier.
10. Click Connect.