Overview

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ETS has assigned ieng6 machines that are configured to support graphical GNOME logins via the VNC protocol. The VNC connection to GNOME may be disconnected and reestablished as desired. It allows users to get a terminal and run commands as they were doing it in ETS Linux labs. The following servers are available with 64-bit Cent OS 7. If you need a 32-bit operating system, please email ets-consult@ucsd.edu.

ieng6-240.ucsd.edu	ieng6-241.ucsd.edu
ieng6-242.ucsd.edu	ieng6-243.ucsd.edu
ieng6-244.ucsd.edu	ieng6-245.ucsd.edu
ieng6-246.ucsd.edu	ieng6-247.ucsd.edu
ieng6-248.ucsd.edu	ieng6-249.ucsd.edu
ieng6-250.ucsd.edu	ieng6-251.ucsd.edu
ieng6-251.ucsd.edu	ieng6-252.ucsd.edu
ieng6-253.ucsd.edu	ieng6-254.ucsd.edu

Then, you will need to start a VNCgnome connection to create your user profile.

Steps to Take

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Start a VNCgnome connection to create your user profile:

Remotix

ETS has licensed software available for Windows and macOS operating systems named Remotix. You can get started with a 15 day trial with these instructions

To obtain a license key for Remotix, please follow our instructions here.

Once you have the software installed, please follow these steps to configure your client.

1. Click New Server to add a server.
2. Set Host to the server you'd like to connect to.
 You can see which servers are available in the table above. (e.g. ieng6-244.ucsd.edu)
3. Click the SSH Tunnel tab and check Use SSH Tunnel
4. Enter your SSH Username (this is your ieng6 account username)
5. Click Save to save the profile.
6. Open an SSH client and log into the same server you specified above.
7. Run vncserver to start your VNC process.

Note your display

Once you run vncserver you will see output similar to the following:

New 'ieng6-244.ucsd.edu:24 (okenobi)' desktop is ieng6-244.ucsd.edu:24>

Please take note of the bolded section, as you will need this to kill your job once you are finished.

Alternatives

If you prefer not to use Remotix, you can use another VNC client, as long as you create the SSH tunnel to forward X11 traffic. Here are some setup instructions for popular tools.

PuTTY & VNC Viewer

1. Open PuTTY and enter the Host Name for the host you would like to connect to.
You can see which servers are available in the table above. (e.g. ieng6-244.ucsd.edu)
2. Under "Category", go to Connection > SSH > X11 and check Enable X11 forwarding.
3. Under Connection > SSH > Tunnels and set Source port to 5900 and Destination to localhost:5900
4. Click "Session" at the very top of the Categories and click Save to save the profile.
5. Click Open to connect to the server.
6. Once you've logged into the server, run vncserver
7. Open VNC Viewer and connect to localhost:0

Terminal on macOS

1. Open your Terminal app and create a tunnel with:
   ssh -X -L 5899:localhost:5900 username@ieng6-###.ucsd.edu
   You can see which servers are available in the table above. (e.g. ieng6-244.ucsd.edu)
2. Once you've logged in, run vncserver
3. Go to Finder > Go > Connect to Server... (or press CMD + K) and enter vnc://localhost:5899
   
   

Logging Off

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Once you are finished, you need to kill the GNOME session. Please run:

vncserver -kill X-display-#

You will be notified what your X-display is when you first start your VNC process. Once you run vncserver you will see output similar to the following:

New 'ieng6-244.ucsd.edu:24 (okenobi)' desktop is ieng6-244.ucsd.edu:24

Please take note of the bolded section, as you will need this to cancel your job once you are finished. In this example, we would kill our VNC process with:

vncserver -kill :24

Long-running jobs

Any processes older than 2 days with a connection to software (e.g. ADS, Cadence) will be killed. Be sure to save your work and exit the program when you're finished.

Troubleshooting

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Black Screen on Connection

Some core files for vncserver were changed Fall 2017. If you find that you can connect to the server, but only get a black screen, please run the following:

ssh username@ieng6.ucsd.edu
rm -rf .vnc/xstartup .cache/gdm .cache/gnome-shell

Once you removed these directories, you should be able to follow the steps above to connect to your remote desktop.