First go to https://portal.live.surfresearchcloud.nl/ and log in using your WUR account. Use this link to request access to the Wageningen University Geoscripting collaboration. We (the staff) have to accept access to this collaboration, and create a virtual machine (VM) for your group. In the meantime, you can set up your two factor authentication:
Navigate to your profile page. Click the Profile options button, and then on Reset Time based password. You should get the following message: “Are you sure you want to reset your password?”. Press Reset. Follow the instructions to set up 2FA. You will need the 2FA code later for logging into the VM.
Once you have been granted access to the Wageningen University Geoscripting collaboration and you have set up 2FA, you should be able to access your VM. Navigate back to the starting page, and scroll down the page to the ‘Workspaces’ section. You should see multiple available workspaces (VMs). Please only make use of the workspace with your group name. If a workspace with your group name/number does not exist, please contact the staff.
At the right of every workspace, there should be a (yellow) button that allows access to the workspace. Press that button for the workspace you want to access. A login-page will show up. Enter the following information:
If your VM is coming out of ‘sleep mode’, and you have to fill in a password to unlock it, you should (again) make use of your 2FA code.
Note that unless you log off from the VM, all tasks will continue running. You should log off before switching devices, as otherwise the previous session will not get resumed. This is because session matching is done by screen resolution. To log off, press the power button at the top right, and press Log Out. Happy coding!
The tutorial above allows you to access the VM in-browser. There are, however, alternatives to access the VM directly from your own machine, for which we provide a tutorial below. There are two main ways to log into your virtual machine (aside from the in-browser option).
The first option is via the “Remote Desktop” app that is built-into Windows, or an RDP client on the other operating systems. To connect to the VM using the Remote Desktop app (‘Extern Bureaublad’ if you have Dutch language settings), you simply need to specify the IP address of the VM to connect (and potentially dismiss some warnings about missing certificates). You can find the IP address of your VM by pressing the down arrow next to ‘State: running’ on this page. For the next steps, it is the same as the in-browser option.
The second option is through a command line using Git Bash
using an SSH key, which is the most efficient way of connecting. This is
because ssh allows forwarding ports to your own computer
and the VMs have server software preinstalled.
First, you need to enrol your SSH key. Navigate to your SRAM profile page. Generate an SSH key on your own machine. Paste your public SSH key into the text box, and click the “Save” button. You should never paste the private key anywhere (it will also not be accepted if you try).
An easy way to find and generate your SSH key is by running Git GUI on your own machine. For further details, see tutorial 1.
You can now run
ssh -L8787:localhost:8787 yoursurfusername@yoursurfvm.nl
(replace the username and the address with your SURF Research Cloud
username and the (IP) address of your VM) to both open a remote
connection from your local terminal to the VM to run Bash code, and also
to forward the port 8787 from the VM to your own computer.
Once you are logged into the VM, in your own computer’s browser you can open http://localhost:8787 and immediately get to RStudio Server, which is hosted on the VM. You will need to log in to RStudio Server using the 2FA method mentioned above. This option is very efficient, because then you are only sending text commands over the internet, and not pictures, which is so much smaller. You also then don’t have issues with repeated keystrokes etc. and you can even use RStudio to upload and download files. The downside is that you need to run that one extra command and open a new tab in your browser.
The same method works for logging into a Jupyter Notebook or Jupyter Lab for working with Python, but they are not installed by default and they use a different port number (by default 8888).
You might want to transfer files to or from the VM, as there is no
link to your WUR M drive on SRC. The best way of transferring files
(ones that are not already on GitLab, that is) is by using
sftp, including a graphical client such as WinSCP.
Another (less elegant) solution to secure your files at the end of the course would be to use a file sharing/storing service such as Dropbox or Google Drive for instance.