Configuring FastX Clients to connect to HPC Systems
Resuming Sessions
- FastX Desktop Connection Issues
76536264
FastX is a program for connecting to the HPC systems with a GUI desktop environment. It is similar to /wiki/spaces/hpcdocs/pages/76514725 connections but is newer and a little more robust when using Duo 2 factor authentication. Please see the FastX documentation site for detailed information on how to use FastX. FastX will send an automatic authentication request to your registered device if using the Duo app. Otherwise it will make a phone call to your registered number. Unlike No Machine though there is a much longer time out so it is more forgiving of slow push response times or the latency of a phone call for authentication. Another benefit that FastX has over No Machine is that you can close a remote desktop session but as long as the FastX program and the connection to the server was not disconnected the underlying ssh session is still active. This means that sessions can be started and stopped on the same server without triggering additional authentication requests from Duo.
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Sessions can be resumed if they are not terminated when the FastX program is closed. This means that you can disconnect from a server but leave the session running and reconnect to it later. In this scenario, the back end ssh connection to the server has to be established so this will require Duo authentication. But once the ssh connection is up FastX will find any existing connections on the server. What is important to keep in mind here is that there is more than one login node for the HPC system, and that they are selected in a round robin manner, so that a connection to the HPC system will resolve to one of the available login nodes. This is important to remember when trying to reconnect to sessions as your new connection will need to land on the same host as the session that you want. If you do this frequently you may want to create explicit connections for each login node.
- argon-login-13.hpc.uiowa.edu
- argon-login-24.hpc.uiowa.edu
- argon-login-35.hpc.uiowa.edu
- argon-login-46.hpc.uiowa.edu
We kindly ask that you please terminate any sessions that you no longer need as they do use resources.
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