The best way to connect to Departmental systems from your computer is via SSH (Secure Shell) client. The SSH protocol provides for the encryption of traffic in transit making it difficult for a third party to snoop or listen in.

We operate SSH servers on all tech-supported Linux systems. You can SSH from any tech-supported Linux system to any other tech-supported Linux system without a password.

In order to access Departmental systems externally (eg. from your home), you will first need to connect to a time sharing server. From there, you can SSH to any other Departmental server.

If you are an undergrad, you will use the time sharing server named “red.eecs.yorku.ca”. If you are anyone else, you will use the time sharing server named “indigo.eecs.yorku.ca”.

There are a number of available SSH clients for Unix, Windows and Mac machines. Unix and Mac users typically use “ssh” from the command line like this:

% ssh indigo.eecs.yorku.ca -l <EECS USERNAME>  or
% ssh red.eecs.yorku.ca -l <EECS USERNAME>

Windows 10 users can use the SSH command line tool as well. However, most Windows users prefer a GUI. For that, we recommend Putty. or Mobaxterm

As mentioned above, you can SSH from any tech-supported Linux system to any other tech-supported Linux system without requiring a password. If you would like to be able to connect from a tech-supported Linux system to a non-tech-supported Linux system (eg. your personal Ubuntu workstation) without entering a password, you will need to carry out a few simple steps.

First, run 'ssh-keygen' on one of the Departmental Unix hosts:

% ssh-keygen -t rsa -N ""
Generating public/private rsa key pair.
Enter file in which to save the key (/eecs/home/xxx/.ssh/id_rsa):

Hit "ENTER".  The public key file (~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub) and the private key file (~/.ssh/id_rsa) will be created.

The public key file looks something like this:

ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EAAAADAQABAAABAQCewDNfAREt/GlH1GL2an0W7Z+sigb3OrirSmjqJdK5PjlZNIB/E07z1CAzUu8AOEXAVt6+a84scyG3gojLUHZrXgMMP8uFfZEw/WkBsAY3gMlU+UqbZwngpTb1eAm4VkrF60hu02zDm1uRYdG4hI4wbyZhsYiYp/xatN1tcw3lKQB2XAojqBaLoSKpu5dfMDsKM42IlDrg530r2z+wdg2rc0jW8CQBGuE55a3Fr7IUvkblwtAG5ORhMlmjaOLO+oUEfm4gRlZ5X2/zN6IgE8yn93lOyuhuaoamyD0EY27oaauPiNhMKtiSI0maIBIk47gfK/nJtW2aRKiOvhx5BZ+x eecs@red

Now, SSH to the destination system that you would like to be able to connect without entering a password (eg. your personal Ubuntu workstation). The first time you access the system, you will still need to enter a password.

Append the contents of the newly generated ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub file to the authorized_keys file on the remote system (eg. ~/.ssh/authorized_keys on Linux systems). If the file does not exist, create it.

Now, you will be able to ssh from your tech-supported Linux host to the other machine without requiring a password.