Prerequisites

Topics

Extras

4. Logging In

Yen access is provided in the following two ways:

  1. Automatically granted to GSB faculty, PhD Students, and Research Fellows
  2. By way of specific faculty approval through this form, renewed quarterly

If you belong to one of the above two groups, you can use the Yen servers! Below are the instructions for connecting to the Yen servers.

We can use a Secure Shell (SSH) protocol to securely connect from your local laptop to another computer such as a remote Yen server. Below are the instructions for connecting from a Mac / Linux OS laptop and a Windows laptop.

Login

Open a terminal or a Git Bash window. Enter the SSH command to login into the server as shown below (Note: replace SUNetID with your SUNet ID and do not type the brackets!). You will be asked to enter your password and authenticate with Duo.

$ ssh <SUNetID>@yen.stanford.edu

For example, I login with:

$ ssh nrapstin@yen.stanford.edu

If the login is successful, you will see something similar to the following:

You can also log into a specific yen server. Choose what yen server you would like to connect to (yen1, yen2, yen3, yen4 or yen5). Here is the example of how to login to the yen3 server:

$ ssh <SUNetID>@yen3.stanford.edu

Save an alias in your ~/.bash_profile with a shorhand for the yen servers. For example, my ~/.bash_profile has this line alias yen="ssh yen.stanford.edu". Then instead of typing ssh yen.stanford.edu, I simply type yen from the Terminal when I want to connect to the Yen servers.

With a graphical interface

If your work requires a Graphical User Interface (GUI) such as MATLAB IDE or RStudio or you need to pop up separate windows of any kind, you will need to login to the Yen servers with the X forwarding enabled.

For Mac OS, you need to have XQuartz installed first. XQuartz usually requires restarting your computer before you can use it.

For Windows, you need to have XMing installed first.

The steps to login with a graphical interface are the same as the above except that you need to add a Y-flag in the SSH command. Again, in the Terminal or GitBash window, type:

$ ssh -Y <SUNetID>@yen.stanford.edu

When prompted, type your SUNet ID password. Then, complete the two-factor authentication process. After you successfully login, check that X-forwarding works correctly. Choose any of the following commands and type it in the yen command line interface as all of them will pop up a window if everything is working correctly - xeyes, xcalc, xlogo or xclock (or choose your favorite X11 command line program).