University of Auckland-specific: Configure operator public SSH key

Modified on Wed, 26 Jun at 12:50 PM

NOTE: This method is no longer used, and we are moving to an automated solution (2024-06)
This document has been kept for reference


Auckland's Nectar operational staff may ask you to configure an SSH key on your Nectar Linux virtual machine (VM).


There may be multiple ways for you to do this, and what is easiest depends on how you launched your VM and how you use it. That is, whether you launched your instance as

  1. A "plain" virtual machine, as described here, and you typically log with an SSH client program, or
  2. An application like R-Studio or Jupyter notebook from the Nectar application catalog, and you connect to it through a browser

If you connect to your VM through SSH

Please log in using the default user account, as usual.
Then, at the command prompt, issue the following command (one line, but might be spread over multiple lines in your browser window) to configure the public key:


echo "ssh-ed25519 AAAAC3NzaC1lZDI1NTE5AAAAICHODQ9IQyUDa7Dm3k9M2I5KU0Qu++hIUqVo+EapIZ2Z [email protected]" >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys


If you connect to your VM through a browser

In this case, there are multiple ways to configure the SSH key, but the following is perhaps the easiest. Taking each browser application in turn:

R-Studio

  1. Load the URL of your R-Studio VM into a browser window
  2. On the start page, choose R-Studio
  3. On the login page, type the username and password you chose when you launched this R-Studio application (replace the values you see in this screenshot with your values), and click the "Sign In" button: 
  4. In the R-Studio development environment, click the Terminal tab 
  5. Copy and paste the following command (one line, but might be spread over multiple lines in your browser window) into the terminal window and hit <enter>:

    echo "ssh-ed25519 AAAAC3NzaC1lZDI1NTE5AAAAICHODQ9IQyUDa7Dm3k9M2I5KU0Qu++hIUqVo+EapIZ2Z [email protected]" >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

  6. Let us know the username for this instance. This is the username you use when you log in to the instance. In the above screenshot it would be mfel395.

Jupyter Notebook

  1. Load the URL of your Jupyter Notebook VM into a browser window
  2. Log in using the password you specified when you launched this Jupyter Notebook application:
  3. Open a Terminal: 
  4. Copy and paste the following command (one line, but might be spread over multiple lines in your browser window) into the terminal window and hit <enter>:

    echo "ssh-ed25519 AAAAC3NzaC1lZDI1NTE5AAAAICHODQ9IQyUDa7Dm3k9M2I5KU0Qu++hIUqVo+EapIZ2Z [email protected]" >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

  5. Let us know the username for this instance. You can find out the username by typing the command whoami, followed by the return key, in the terminal. Alternatively, you can find the username in the command prompt in the terminal. In the above screenshot it would be mfel395.

Was this article helpful?

That’s Great!

Thank you for your feedback

Sorry! We couldn't be helpful

Thank you for your feedback

Let us know how can we improve this article!

Select at least one of the reasons
CAPTCHA verification is required.

Feedback sent

We appreciate your effort and will try to fix the article