Instructions for running remote terminal sessions on unix machines from Windows
Note You need to have administrator privileges to do some of this
On Windows 11 type “Make Me “ in the search area and it should pop up a “Make Me Adminstrator” window that allows you to be administrator for 30 minutes. You will need to do this again after 30 minutes. If something fails, it may be because the time ran out.
Kerberos Ticket Manager
Download the MIT Kerberos Ticket Manager MSI installer from here (“MIT Kerberos for Windows 4.1” as of the time of writing). The installation is mostly automatic - if prompted for the type of installation, choosing “Typical” will be fine.
Once this is installed, you can launch it as an app to manage your Kerberos tickets. To prepare to login to the FNAL cluster, press “Get Ticket”, and you can authenticate with [username]@<KERBEROS.WHERE> and the Kerberos password that you should already have setup. This replaces the kinit command that’s used to obtain a Kerberos ticket in unix systems, and the graphical interface shows you your active tickets instead of using klist as in unix systems.
Note: May need a krb5.conf file
Some sites require a krb5.conf file to customize access. Ask about site-specific configuration requirements. For Fermilab find it here krb5conf
Terminal emulators
MobaXterm
MobaXterm is a replacement for Putty/Xming. I found it easier to set up and install.
Just install from the website and get it to talk to MIT Kerberos (not the default)
One thing to remember in all of this is that your username may be different on your personal machine than on the remote system. Remember to set it correctly.
This was added in 2024 when we had trouble installing Xming
PuTTY/Xming
PuTTY
This is an alternate application to use in Windows as a terminal and to SSH into other systems. Download the appropriate Windows installer (MSI file) for your system from here (probably the 64-bit x86).
The default options for the installer should be fine.
Once you start trying to use putty to access remote systems, you need to do some configuration.
Xming with PuTTY
This is used for X11 graphics forwarding. Download from here (see also official notes). Run the installer (keeping all default options is fine).
Once installed, run XLaunch to check the settings. Follow the XLaunch configurations specified here.
Once this is done, in the future when you need to use X11 graphics forwarding, simply launch Xming and let it run in the background.
Configuring PuTTY for remote use
Once all the previous components are installed, open up PuTTY and configure as follows:
- Under Connection/SSH/X11, check “Enable X11 Forwarding”, and set the X display location to “localhost:0.0”
- Under Connection/SSH/Auth/GSSAPI, check “Allow GSSAPI credential delegation”. Make sure the MIT Kerberos GSSAPI64.DLL (or GSSAPI32.DLL, if you’re using the 32-bit version) is in the list of “Preference order for GSSAPI libraries”. If it’s not, use the “User-supplied GSSAPI library path” option to navigate to where you’ve installed the MIT Kerberos ticket manager and select this library.
- Under Session, Fill in the host name with [username]@
. - Save this configuration by typing a name in the box labeled “Saved Sessions” and pressing “Save”. You can load this configuration in the future to reuse these settings.
Done!
This should allow you to SSH to the remote unix cluster and follow the rest of the tutorial.
Created on 20220508 using notes provided by Roger Huang.