Tips and tricks (and hacks)

1 How to connect via point-and-click Graphical User Interface (GUI) (on Linux and Windows)
2 How to copy data to and from RDS
3 Can I use an S3 bucket for storage.
4 Adding additional users to Auto Scale Clusters
5 Windows machines
6 Making Windows machines “useful”

How to connect via point-and-click Graphical User Interface (GUI) (on Linux and Windows)

If you want a full point and click interface to control programs with your mouse, you can use a VNC client.

Ronin provides a pre-configured method available through Ronin-link. When you click “Connect to Machine” you will be given the option to connect via “Desktop”, the first time you click that it will install the NICE DCV server and launch you a desktop.

For native instructions on how to set this up see the AWS documentation:

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/dcv/latest/adminguide/setting-up-installing-linux.html

How to copy data to and from RDS

You can use the usual methods to copy to and from your RDS drive as you would from any off-network location, i.e. see for details Research Data Store

Or you can mount your RDS drive on your image using a tool like sshfs with these commands:

sudo apt install sshfs

mkdir /home/ubuntu/myRDS

sshfs <unikey>@research-data-ext.sydney.edu.au:/rds/PRJ-<yourproject> /home/ubuntu/myRDS

Done! Now you can copy back and forth between RDS and your RONIN machine seamlessly.

Security to keep in mind: If you have mounted your RDS, then anyone who gets access to your machine will have read/write/delete access to your RDS.

If you need to un-mount your drive, use:

sudo umount /home/ubuntu/myRDS

Note: there is a cost (~$0.15/GB) for copying data TO your RDS drive (data egress). Copying data from your RDS is free (data ingress).

Can I use an S3 bucket for storage.

Yes! If you want to keep your data in the AWS cloud, you can add and use S3 storage as required, for details see:

https://blog.ronin.cloud/object-storage/

If you want to connect to an external S3 bucket you may have to add the “--no-sign-request“ flag. For example:

aws s3 ls s3://sra-pub-sars-cov2/README.txt --no-sign-request

Adding additional users to Auto Scale Clusters

Sometimes you may want to add a new user to the machine that is not part of the project, but may need to connect to the box. Generally this is not recommended. Nevertheless you can run a script like this:

#!/bin/bash
SRC=$1
DEST=$2
SRC_GROUPS=$(id -Gn ${SRC} | sed "s/ /,/g" | sed -r 's/\<'sudo'\>\b,?//g' | sed -r 's/\<'${SRC}'\>\b,?//g')
SRC_SHELL=$(awk -F : -v name=${SRC} '(name == $1) { print $7 }' /etc/passwd)
sudo useradd --groups ${SRC_GROUPS} --shell ${SRC_SHELL} --create-home ${DEST}
sudo passwd ${DEST}

And create a new user with “clone_user.sh ubuntu newusername”

You then will need to call sbatch (and similar) from its path, e.g. /opt/slurm/bin/sbatch

Again, not recommended for Ronin, but you may find a use case where you need to do this. Note, there is additional configuration required to allow this user to login via ssh.

Windows machines

When creating a windows machine I have noticed a bug that requires an immediate password change.

Even when entering the correct password you are met with the very helpful message “The logon attempt failed”.

To resolve this follow these steps:

Create a machine as normal (and set a password).

After the machine is ready, change tabs and provide a new password via “set password”. You can use the same password as before. Now you should be able to log in via RDP as normal.

Making Windows machines “useful”

The default settings on Internet Explorer are very restrictive, the easy way to “get started” is to adjust the security levels in the settings menu of IE so you can download files from the internet. Go download firefox and then go from there!