Accessing Balena

Overview:

  • Teaching: 10 min
  • Exercises: 5 min

Questions

  • How do I get access to Balena?
  • How do I login to Balena?
  • Can I access Balena remotely?

Objectives

  • Know that you can access Balena using your University account, but this needs to be activated by your department champion
  • Know that you can log-in to Balena using ssh, Putty (Kitty on University PCs)
  • Know that if you are off campus you need to use VPN to connect to Balena

Get an account

To access Balena your account needs to be authorised by your departmental champion if your department does not have one you should contact hpc-support to get access.

Off-campus access

In order to access Balena remotely but you will need to connect to the Unviersity VPN.

Login to Balena

We login to Balena using secure shell, ssh. If you are a linux/MacOS user the ssh command can be run from the terminal/command line. The name of the machine is balena.bath.ac.uk so your command should be:

ssh <your_username>@balena.bath.ac.uk

If you are using a computer with your University username you can omit the <your_username>@.

If you are a Windows users you can use Putty. On University PCs a derivative of Putty, Kitty is pre-configured to access Balena. If you are working on your own machine you will need to set up Putty/Kitty yourself:

Creating a Putty session

Then you can load and open the session to login to Balena:

Running a Putty session

Message of the Day

Once you have logged on you will see something like the below screen shot. Note that if you are asked for a password nothing will be printed to the screen and the cursor will not move.

Balena login and message of the day

The message of the day is used to inform users of any issues, pending maintenance or general announcements that they should be aware of. Once logged on you will see the 'prompt' which looks something like:

[username@balena-01 ~]$

Off-campus access without vpn

If for any reason you are unable to use the vpn to access Balena it is possible to use the University's linux service as a gateway. First replace balena.bath.ac.uk with linux.bath.ac.uk if you are using ssh or create a new session if you are using Putty. Once logged in to thhis you can use:

$ ssh balena.bath.ac.uk

to connect to Balena.

Useful commands/information

Once you are logged in try running some of the following commands, can you interpret the output?

$ whoami
$ hostname
$ pwd
$ df -h
$ cat /proc/cpuinfo
$ cat /proc/meminfo

If you can't work out what they are doing remember you can typically find out what a program is doing with man [program] or program --help.

Key Points:

  • Any researcher with a Bath account can request to use Balena
  • Use ssh, Putty (Kitty on University PCs) to login to Balena
  • If you are off campus remember to connect to the VPN to access Balena

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