Accessing the cluster from a remote system

The following are some common commands for accessing the master node of the cluster from a remote site.

• ssh <machinename> starts a secure remote login session on the machine <machinename>.

• ssh <machinename> <command> runs the command remotely on the machine called machinename and redirects the output to your terminal.

• scp lets you copy files to remote machines.

Note that the letter s stands for secure. All these commands encrypt your data on the network to protect against eavesdroppers. These commands replace the unsecure equivalents (rlogin, rsh, rcp) that have been used commonly in the past for accessing remote machines.

The command scp also has an option -r that lets you copy directories. In addition, you can specify a directory to copy to on the remote machine. Remember that the pathnames are relative to your home directory on the remote machine. For example to copy recursively a directory named prog1 on your local system to the master node onyx.boisestate.edu, use the following command:

scp -r prog1/ onyx.boisestate.edu:cs430/prog1