Graphical Interface for SSH shortcuts in MacOS

Suhas Somnath
Advanced Data and Workflows Group
National Center for Computational Sciences
Oak Ridge National Laboratory

10/9/2017

This is applicable for MacOS ONLY

The Mac Terminal application comes with utilities that simplify the ssh process with a graphical interface. If you are comfortable with the command line and do not mind typing ssh / sftp commands you do not need to follow the following steps.

Simply accessing the VM

1. Open the Terminal app
2. Go to Shell → New Remote Connection
3. Click on the + icon under the right-hand column (Server).
4. Type the address of your instance like cades@172.22.3.50 into the pop up window as shown in the image below
5. Click OK.

1. You should see a new entry in the Server column.

1. You can now click on the Connect button to connect to your VM

2. You can use the same entries for other services such as Secure File Transfer (sftp).

Tunneling to Remote Server

The former application does not make a particularly compelling case for setting up the GUI shortcut. However, it is very handy for setting up the necessary SSH tunnels to your VM (already) running a Jupyter server. See this page for instructions.