Better Remote Access

The BioHPC has some quality-of-life things that makes remoting into the servers a lot easier. This outlines some of the things that reduce the friction of remote access.

You can set up an SSH key on your local machine and save it with BioHPC for password-free login

https://biohpc.cornell.edu/lab/ssh_keys.aspx <- full instructions, pretty simple
Select “Terminal (ssh command via Mac…)” from the dropdown

You can use your laptop/computer’s hardware encryption instead of the 2-factor Duo authentication (Win/Mac)

Select “Hardware-backed secure keys (2FA Alternative)” from the drop down

You can SSH into BioHPC off campus without VPN by logging into the login node (cbsulogin.biohpc.cornell.edu) and ssh-ing into whatever specific server you want
You can shortcut ssh-ing altogether by setting up ~/.ssh/config with all your SSH targets and specific configurations for them.

This can automate bullets 1 and 3, plus additional perks like logging into a specific shell (e.g. ZSH)
e.g. You can rename cbsugenomics2.biohpc.cornell.edu “Genomics2”, so that it can be accessed more simply by calling

ssh Genomics2

An actual config:

This are the contents of file ~/.ssh/config:

Host Nina
    HostName cbsunt246.tc.cornell.edu
    User pd348
    IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_ed25519
    IdentitiesOnly yes
    RequestTTY force
    RemoteCommand zsh -l
    ProxyJump Cornell

Host Cornell
    Hostname cbsulogin.biohpc.cornell.edu
    User pd348
    IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_ed25519
    IdentitiesOnly yes
    RequestTTY force

The ssh-tunneling described above is achieved by the ProxyJump line provided under Nina, where it first connects to Cornell, and from there jumps into Nina. So, a very real world case is simply:

ssh Nina

That’s it. It seems to work for VScode and Zed editors as well.

Cluster Structure