Some of us have had problems with the web shell and getting into the Jetstream portal. These materials will show you how to log in using an SSH key through your local terminal.
Cryptographic keys are a convenient and secure way to authenticate without having to use passwords. They consist of a pair of files called the public and private keys: the public part can be shared with whoever you’d like to authenticate with (in our case, Jetstream!), and the private part is kept “secret” on your machine. Things that are encrypted with the public key can be be decrypted with the private key, but it is computationally intractable (ie, it would take on the order of thousands of years) to determine a private key from a public key. You can read more about it here.
The good news is that there is already a registered public key for our Jetstream account. However, to make use of it, you’ll need the private key. And so, we move on!
The private key has been posted on slack in the #general
channel. You can download it by
visiting here, selecting
Actions, and pressing download.
In order to connect to your instance, we need to know its IP address, its unique identifier on the internet. This is listed in your instance details, circled below:
Now, things diverge a little.
These systems have their own terminal by default. Find and open your terminal: on MacOS, you can search for Terminal in finder.
We’re going to assume that the key file ended up in your Downloads
folder. In your terminal,
run:
cd && mv ~/Downloads/angus_private_key .
This puts the file in your home folder. Now, we need to set its permissions more strictly:
chmod 600 angus_private_key
Finally, we can use the IP address from before, along with the common login name and the key, to log in:
ssh -i angus_private_key tx160085@YOUR_IP_ADDRESS
You should now have access to atmosphere within your local terminal.
For Windows, we first need to actually install a terminal.
First, download mobaxterm home edition (portable) and run it.
Fill in your “remote host,” which will be the IP address from earlier. Then select
“specify username” and enter tx160085
.
Copy the downloaded private file onto your primary hard disk (generally C:) and the put in the full path to it.