Grid5000 for Microsoft Windows users

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Grid5000 for Microsoft Windows users

This page presents some tips to use Grid'5000 on Windows in case you do not have access to software such as OpenSSH on Linux.

Connection through a web interface

Shell in a Box

If you want an out-of-the-box solution which does not require you to configure SSH, you can connect through a web interface. The interface is available at https://intranet.grid5000.fr/shell/SITE/. For example, to access nancy's site, use: https://intranet.grid5000.fr/shell/nancy/ To connect you will have to type in your credentials twice (first for the HTTP proxy, then for the SSH connection).

This solution is probably suitable to follow the getting started tutorial, but is unlikely to be suitable for real Grid'5000 usage. So you should probably read the next sections about how to configure and use SSH on Windows at some point.

Jupyter Notebooks

Grid'5000 supports Jupyter notebooks and Jupyter lab servers. Jupyter lab servers provide you with a simple web interface to submit jobs on Grid'5000 and run python Notebooks. Using notebooks will allow you to track your experiment evolution during your exploratory phase while scripting part of your process.

You can find more information about Jupyter Lab and python notebooks on the Notebooks page.

SSH connections (terminal, file transfers)

WSL

The RECOMMENDED solution to use Grid'5000 on a machine running Microsoft Windows as its operating system is to use WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) so that you get access to the whole Linux software within Windows.

Once WSL is installed on your system, the SSH Grid'5000 tutorials will not need any adaptation.

OpenSSH on Windows 10+

OpenSSH is natively available since Windows 10 April 2018 Update.

Using OpenSSH on windows requires a different SSH setting from what is recommended on Linux or WSL. In your .ssh directory C:\Users\your_username/.ssh/ create a file named "config" in and paste : 

# Alias for the gateway without VPN
Host g5k
  User <username_g5k>
  Hostname access.grid5000.fr
  ForwardAgent no
Host *grid5000.fr
  User <username_g5k>
  ProxyCommand ssh.exe -W %h:%p g5k
  IdentityFile ~/.ssh/<name_of_your_private_key>
  ForwardAgent yes

Then you can use the following kind of commands to interact with the platform: 

ssh nancy.grid5000.fr # connection to the Nancy Frontend
ssh troll-1.grenoble.grid5000.fr # Connection to a reserved node in Grenoble
scp -r c:/users/your_username/your_datafolder nancy.grid5000.fr:/myprojects/

Using OpenSSH has some drawbacks such as:

  • the rsync command is not available (rsync is part of our recommended toolset to transfer data efficiently with Grid5000).
  • using natively windows instead of WSL on your workstation does not give you access to the same set of commands that you will find on our frontends / or nodes.

Putty (NOT RECOMMENDED)

Free windowish SSH client: http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/

About proxy commands with putty: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/28926612/putty-configuration-equivalent-to-openssh-proxycommand

VPN

Refer to https://www.grid5000.fr/w/VPN#Windows to setup a non captive VPN which will allow you to access to Grid5000 directly.

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