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Home Office

These guides are written with the perspective of a Linux user, but most should work for Mac people as well.

How to work from home

Access the ITB network via command line

You can use SSH to get access to our gateway server and after that continue on hopping onto other machines or servers.

ssh <username>@gate.biologie.hu-berlin.de

You will be asked for the password of your ssh key. Logging in with your ITB password is not enabled on gate.biologie.hu-berlin.de.

If you have not created an ssh key yet, you will need to do so (or look into using the ITB’s OpenVPN). Run the following on your local machine to create a new certificate:

ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -a 100

You will then need to store the public key in your home folder in the ITB network. You can accomplish this either while at the ITB or when using the OpenVPN. Since the public key lives in your home folder, you can choose any internal computer that you have access to. In this example, we take the computer ssh.itb.biologie.hu-berlin.de (which is same server that you would reach through gate.biologie.hu-berlin.de):

ssh-copy-id <username>@ssh.itb.biologie.hu-berlin.de

You now can SSH into any of the internal ITB computers as well as gate.biologie.hu-berlin.de without having to type your ITB password. (You might still need to unlock the ssh key.)

If you want to minimise your typing even more, add the connection information to your local SSH configuration file.

nano ~/.ssh/config

Then paste this in:

Host itb
  HostName gate.biologie.hu-berlin.de
  User <username>
  ServerAliveInterval 300
  ServerAliveCountMax 2

From now on you can just log in by typing ssh itb. Furthermore, the bottom two options will fortify your SSH connection against short network outages. If you need to connect to other servers than gate.biologie.hu-berlin.de, it is advised to use the VPN or the SSH tunnel.

Copy files between the ITB network and your local computer

This one is fairly straightforward, just use the scp command instead of the normal cp.

scp itb:/path/to/file /path/to/local/folder/
scp /path/to/local/folder/ itb:/path/to/file

Mount folders for easy file access

If you want to access many files all the time, you can map locations in your local filesystem directly to folders in the ITB network. This can look as follows:

  1. Create new empty folders as mounting points.
mkdir -p ~/ITB/home
mkdir -p ~/ITB/groups
  1. Mount remote folders.
sshfs -o follow_symlinks itb:/home/<user> ~/ITB/home
sshfs -o follow_symlinks itb:/groups/<group> ~/ITB/groups
  1. Enjoy browsing your files like you normally would.
  2. When you're done, close your connection to the ITB like so:
fusermount -u /home/<local_user>/ITB/home
fusermount -u /home/<local_user>/ITB/groups

Gain access to journals

Accessing journals is not possible with the ITB’s VPN, as our VPN will only route the connections of the ITB network and not change your public IP address. However, it is still possilbe with a bit of trickery.

Remote desktop

to do