When users are off-site or have slow internet connections, displaying graphics can be cumbersome. PCDS has explored two solutions for this problem. The first ("NX technology") gives the user a special remote desktop that is specifically designed to improve the performance of X11 graphics with slow connection speeds. The second ("Virtual Box") allows the user to directly install the psana analysis environment on their windows/mac machine, so that LCLS data analysis (including graphics) can be done with no network connection.
Nomachine NX is supported on Windows, MAC and Linux computers.
Use the following steps to setup the nomachine client:
1. Go to www.nomachine.com and click on the 'Download now' button to download and install NoMachine client
2. You will be prompted to setup a login profile when launching the NoMachine for the first time. Select the following options:
Protocol: ssh (this will select port 22 by default) Host: psnxserv.slac.stanford.edu Authentication: Use the NoMachine login (not the "system login") Proxy: Don't use a proxy Save as: Choose a name such as PSNXSERV
When you are done, hit the Continue button to save the connection profile
3. You can hit Connect to start the connection
4. You will be prompted for your username and password. Enter your SLAC's Unix account and hit OK
5. Click on 'New virtual desktop or custom session'
6. Click 'Create a new GNOME virtual desktop'. You will be logged in after that
7. A useful feature: to get the the Access Menu: Ctrl-Alt-0 (windows) or Ctrl-Option-0 (mac) or click on upper right corner of the nomachine desktop screen to bring up the nomachine setting screen
To auto-resize windows resolution automatically (so you don't have to do the manual sizing below) go to the Access Menu in the previous line, and click Display -> ResizeRemoteScreen, then click "Done" and "Done" again to close the menu.
To resize the window manually: Click on System->Preferences->Display, select 'Resize remote screen'. When you change the screen resolution you may not see enough of the window to click "Apply". On MAC: To do this on the keyboard: hit "option-A". On Windows: use "alt-A".
You can open a terminal with Applications->SystemTools->Terminal (or right-click on the desktop and select "Open in Terminal"
You can also disable nomachine service if you will not share out the desktop by disabling Nomachine service
Please contact pcds-help@slac.stanford.edu if you need more information or additional assistance with NoMachine NX.
There is also another NX server at nxserv.slac.stanford.edu
that is an IT-maintained NX host, using your AFS home rather than PCDS home. It may be useful to you for... things.
If you find that you cannot start a desktop session even after successfully authenticating from a Windows/OSX NoMachine client version 4.3+, try the following workaround:
In the file $USER/.nx/config/player.cfg
, find the line:
<option key="SSH client mode" value="library" />
Change it to read:
<option key="SSH client mode" value="native" />
It is not yet known when this workaround could be undone (e.g. by upgrading the server software).