Using Unix/Linux to access hesperia’s floating IDL license through the Goddard firewall.
25 February 2005

Perform the following as a one-time set-up:

On your home system first modify your
/etc/hosts file so that "hesperia" is the loopback address:

127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost home hesperia

This is required because the FlexLM license server knows who it is supposed to be.

Next, create a "basic" license.dat file.  Where you save it will depend upon where IDL is installed.  On most machines this file is located in /usr/local/rsi/license/license.dat:

SERVER localhost 80fb13dc 17000
USE_SERVER

First establish two SSH tunnels to any computer running an SSH server behind the Goddard firewall:

ssh -f -N -L 17000:hesperia.gsfc.nasa.gov:1700 user@any_machine.gsfc.nasa.gov
ssh -f -N -L 32784:hesperia.gsfc.nasa.gov: 32784 user@any_machine.gsfc.nasa.gov

Then, use the "idl" command as you normally would. As long as those tunnels are up, everything should work. Note that you use the arbitrary ports "17000" and " 32784" because they are free (high numbers). Privileged ports (1023 and below) can only be forwarded by root.

The two ‘backgrounded’ SSH commands executed above will persist indefinitely until either the computer is powered off or until you explicitly kill the processes associated with them.

 

 

 

Using Windows to access hesperia’s floating IDL license through the Goddard firewall.

Perform the following as a one-time set-up:

First define the system wide environment variable LM_LICENSE_FILE.  The value for this variable is 1700@hesperia.  This will ensure that laptop users can still access hesperia's floating idl license while working at Goddard when Putty is not running.

Next, create a "basic" license.dat file.  Where you save it depends on where IDL is installed.  On most machines this file is located in c:\rsi\license\license.dat:

SERVER localhost 80fb13dc 17000
USE_SERVER

We need to establish two SSH tunnels using Putty.  In this example we are connecting to hesperia, however, we can connect to any computer behind the Goddard firewall running an SSH server.  Click on Putty's session tab and enter the information below:

 

Click on the SSH tab and select 2 only as the preferred SSH protocol version:

 

Click on the Tunnels tab and enter the information below for ports 1700 and 17000.  Click Add.

 

For port 32784 enter the information below.

 

 Click Add again.

 

Go back to the Session tab, give this session a name and click Save.

Click Open and login to hesperia.  Start up IDL locally.  If all goes well you should be able to access hesperia's floating IDL license.