First connection

At your first attempt to connect to PSMN (either from the ENS network or from outside, see figure below), you (may) have to accept our SSH HostKey :

The following message will appear at your first attempt to connect by SSH to allo-psmn (or ssh.psmn, then allo-psmn):

The authenticity of host allo-psmn.ens-lyon.fr (140.77.144.90) can not be established.
RSA key fingerprint is xx:lots:of:caracters:ascii:xx:xx.

To the question:

Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)?

answer :

yes
PSMN gateways synoptic

Fig. 2 Internal or External PSMN gateways synoptic

Warning

Banned IP?

As ssh.psmn.ens-lyon.fr is a known SSH gateway for a (very) long time, it is very exposed to attacks. So our layered protections are very sensitive and easy to trigger.

You will be banned on your first error. Open a ticket, with explanations, to unban your account.

Define an minimal working environment

See our Environment & tools chapters.

  • Define minimal ssh configuration

To automate as much as possible connections to machines and compute nodes, create the following configuration file (~/.ssh/config) on your client workstation:

Host *
  ServerAliveInterval 60
  ForwardX11Timeout 1d
  TCPKeepAlive yes
  ForwardAgent yes
  ForwardX11 yes         # for Linux
#  ForwardX11Trusted yes # for MacOSX
  Compression yes
  StrictHostKeyChecking no
  HashKnownHosts no

You can find a more complete file in the chapter Example of SSH configuration.

  • vi/vim configuration file

See our vim chapter in editors page.