Instructions for Accessing Digital Lab Remotely

Table of Contents

Although you are welcome to use your own computer to work on the labs, the laboratory assignments must be passed off on the lab computers in the Digital Lab. You are strongly encouraged to run the passoff and submission scripts on these computers when you submit your labs. Your submission will be graded on these computers and differences between your computer setup and the digital lab setup may cause your submission to fail on the digital lab computers. This tutorial will describe how you can log into the lab computers remotely.

1. Connect to the BYU CAEDM VPN

You must be connected to the BYU CAEDM VPN in order to log into the digital lab computers. The instructions for connecting to the VPN are described here.

2. Login in to the digital lab computers through SSH

Once your VPN connection is established, you can log in directly to one of the digital lab computers using ‘ssh’. There are 60 computers in the digital lab (room EB 423). The hostname for these computers are digital-XX.et.byu.edu where XX is the number of the computer (note that the number is two digits, so computer 1 is digital-01.et.byu.edu). An example of a command line executable to log into machine #9 in the digital lab is as follows:

ssh <username>@digital-09.et.byu.edu

You will need to enter your password credentials to complete the login process.

Note that by default you cannot run GUI programs in this terminal. It is possible to export the GUI programs to your remote computer, but this is beyond the scope of this tutorial.

3. Generating ssh key

It is often convenient to create an ssh key on your computer, so you can ‘ssh’ into the digital lab computers without entering your password. If you haven’t done so, create a public ssh key as described in the GitHub SSH Key tutorial.

Next, copy your key to the remote computer as follows:

ssh-copy-id username@digital-10.et.byu.edu

You do not need to do this for each computer in the lab. Copying the key on one computer will allow you ssh access to all of the computers in the lab.

4. Create a Remote VScode session

It is more convenient to open a remote session to a digital lab computer directly within VScode. When connected with a VScode window you have access to all the VScode tools such as the syntax highlighters, file browser, GitHub interface, etc. Further, you can open up as many terminals as necessary to complete your work.

You can open a remote VSCode session by following these steps (see this tutorial) with more details:

  1. Open a VSCode window
  2. Access the remote-ssh connection dialog in one of two ways:
    • Click on the bottom right icon:
    • Select Remote-SSH: Connect to Host… from the Command Palette (F1, Ctrl+Shift+P)
  3. Select ‘connect to host’
  4. Enter your username and hostname in the window (username@digital-10.et.byu.edu)

The first time you access the host it may take some time as the VSCode server is downloaded on the remote machine. Once this is complete you can access your file system and work on your labs.