Connecting to CIR Systems from Windows

Introduction

Computationally Intensive Research (CIR) systems such as the CSF, iCSF, HTCondor and rds-ssh are Linux systems but can easily be accessed from your Windows desktop.

Here we provide some useful information for those users accessing any of these systems from Windows and who may be less familiar with Linux. In short, we highly recommend you use the free MobaXterm application from your Windows PC/laptop (see later.)

Use the correct hostname

The instructions in some of the pages linked to below use the CSF as the example system. To access other Linux-based CIR system on which you have been given an account simply replace any occurrences of

csf3.itservices.manchester.ac.uk

with the hostname of the system you wish to access, for example:

System	Hostname used for access
CSF	csf3.itservices.manchester.ac.uk
iCSF	incline256.itservices.manchester.ac.uk (recommended, see here for details) incline2000.itservices.manchester.ac.uk incline.itservices.manchester.ac.uk
condor	submitter.itservices.manchester.ac.uk
Zrek	zrek.itservices.manchester.ac.uk
RDS SSH	rds-ssh.itservices.manchester.ac.uk
SSH gateways	nyx5.itservices.manchester.ac.uk nyx6.itservices.manchester.ac.uk nyx7.itservices.manchester.ac.uk

Logging in to CIR systems from Windows

New (preferred) method: Install MobaXTerm

We are now recommending a new utility to access the CIR systems from Windows – a free open-source application named MobaXterm. This provides a SSH terminal, X server and WinSCP-like functionality all in one application with a very neat user interface. Previously we used separate programs (PuTTY, Xming and WinSCP) but MobaXterm does it all in one app.

Please follow our MobaXterm installation and setup notes for complete (yet quick and simple) instructions on installing MobaXterm and connecting to CIR systems.

Previous method: PuTTY, Xming, WinSCP

Previously we used PuTTY, Xming and WinSCP to access CIR facilities from Windows. These tools can still be used but are more complicated to set up. They are installed on Windows7 Managed Desktops or can be downloaded to your own computer.

Our PuTTY, Xming, WinSCP installation and setup notes provides all of the details if you wish to use these applications (written for accessing the CSF but you can use one of the hostnames above instead).

Advice for Windows Users

For further advice on using CIR systems once you have logged in from Windows, please see this section.