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SSH to Student Server

The basics of logging in

We are going to login remotely with SSH1

If you are on Linux or Mac you need to open a Terminal. You can do this my searching for terminal in the applications menu.

If you are on Windows, you need to open Powershell. You can open this by clicking the start menu and searching for powershell.

Once we have our Shell open on our local machines we can attempt to connect to the student server with the following command:

ssh $USERNAME@student.computing.dcu.ie

Note

You should replace $USERNAME with your DCU username

The first time you connect you will get a message saying that SSH thinks that you have never connected to this server before.
This is normal and you can type the word yes and press Enter

The authenticity of host 'student.computing.dcu.ie (136.206.218.15)' can't be established.
ECDSA key fingerprint is SHA256:A7yV0cBdiWax/Ru3p4cKokh/ieS3tO7uZTQEt5ii+fE.
Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)?yes

After this message you will be asked to enter your password after the password prompt

eUser2@Desktop:~# ssh eUser2@student.computing.dcu.ie
Password:

Info

When you type your password, nothing will appear but the characters are being inputted

If you have 2 Factor Authentication enabled you will also be asked for your one time code from your Google Authenticator App. You type this in when it asks for keyboard-interactive

eUser2@Desktop:~# ssh eUser2@student.computing.dcu.ie
Password:
keyboard-interactive:

Once you have logged in you should be greeted with a login message

---------------[ Welcome to DCU Computing Student Server ]-------------------
----------------------[ linuxadmin@computing.dcu.ie ]------------------------

  ------------------------------[ Note ]----------------------------------
  |           Please note the following login restrictions:              |
  | After 3 failed login attempts, your connection is banned for 1 hour. |
  ------------------------------------------------------------------------

Storage space report for eUser2's SoC account:
     storage: |==================          | 52%,  516MB used,  460MB free
  file count: |===================         | 55%, 11180Used,    8820Free

Two Factor Auth:  Enabled

Here you can see a message about failed logins and also your storage on the student server.
You should not go over your storage limit or your account will lock you out.

You can display how much storage you are using at any time with the qcheck command

  1. The student server doesn't have a computer screen, so we need a way to access it and run commands on it remotely. Usually the application we run the commands in is called a Shell. SSH stands for SecureSHell, it allows us to connect remotly to run commands ↩