NoMachine

Quick Start

1. Open any web browser
2. Go to this URL:
   https://nx.slac.stanford.edu:4443/
3. There will be an SSL warning you can ignore (this will be fixed soon)
4. Enter your SLAC Unix username and password
5. Click on the "New desktop" button
6. Double click on "Create a new virtual desktop"
7. You will get a "MATE linux desktop".  You can open a terminal and ssh to other slac machines and run GUI programs.
   1. Enter "ssh -X ..." to enable X11 forwarding (this will be fixed to be the default later)

Connectivity Details

Documentation

The SLAC IT NoMachine cluster is accessed using the "nx.slac.stanford.edu" server name, or the https://nx.slac.stanford.edu:4443 URL. There are three load balanced servers providing resources, and each of them has 16 CPU cores, and 128 GB of memory. If you need to debug or test something, you can ssh directly into the members of the cluster, however the NoMachine interface and login is accessed using the “nx” server name and URL as shown above. The member hostnames of the NoMachine cluster are nx1, nx2, nx3.

The local /home directory is not currently backed up. The local /home directory is not intended for permanent storage. Networked filesystems such as AFS, NFS, GPFS, or Lustre should be used for data and permanent storage.

Desktop environment:
The desktop environment installed is MATE, which was chosen for the balance of user friendliness, and also being lightweight on memory and cpu requirements.  

Terminal emulation:
The recommended terminal emulation program is gnome-terminal. Other choices which are installed include xterm, mate-terminal, and xfce4-terminal.