Access

Our terminal servers are the gateway to the KTA Computer System. Users can access these servers via SSH (Secure Shell) using the credentials of their LRZ account. The terminal servers are designed to handle a wide range of computational tasks, but are mostly intended for development, software compilation and short running computations. For computationally intensive tasks or large scale analysis we advise our users to use the batchfarm.

New users need to request access to the KTA Computer system by contacting the KTA Admins. Write a formless email to ktas.admin@ph.tum.de detailing your association and your LRZ ID.

Access through terminal servers¶

Users can access the terminal servers via SSH (Secure Shell) using their LRZ account. To connect to the terminal servers

• from within the university network, users can directly SSH into the terminal servers. Or

• from outside the university network, users must first establish a connection to the VPN (Virtual Private Network) provided by the LRZ. Once connected to the VPN, they can SSH into the terminal servers as if they were on campus.

To connect from your local machine, simply run the command

$ ssh <LRZ-ID>@nidoking.ktas.ph.tum.de

where you need to replace <LRZ-ID> with your own which normally has a form like ga12abc.

Here is an overview of all available terminal servers.

Graphical Access¶

Users can also access a graphical interface to the KTA Computer System using two methods: X11 forwarding and VNC (Virtual Network Computing).

X11 Forwarding¶

This method allows a user to launch a graphical application (like rootbrowser) on the remote host and receive the graphical output on their local machine. To activate it, run this modified SSH command

$ ssh <LRZ-ID>@nidoking.ktas.ph.tum.de -Y -C

The option -Y activates the forwarding while the option -C enables the compression of the data stream to improve responsiveness. Once connected, run a graphical application of your choice like

$ rootbrowse

and wait for the graphical interface to pop up. As shown here

This will block your shell until you close the application or fork it to the background. This is useful in a pinch, but if you need to run multiple graphical applications we recommend the next method.

VNC¶

This methods allows to launch a full-fledge graphical environment on one of our terminal servers. A VNC server is running on all terminal servers and every user can connect to them by forwarding port 5900 via SSH tunneling to their local machine and then listening on the forwarded port with a VNC viewer. We recommend to use TigerVNC. To forward port 5900, run this modified SSH command

$ ssh <LRZ-ID>@nidoking.ktas.ph.tum.de -L 5900:localhost:5900

to forward port 5900 of the terminal host to port 5900 on your local machine. After launching TigerVNC and listening on localhost (port 5900 is selected by default), the login window will be opened. As shown here

To log into the graphical environment use your LRZ ID and credentials.