shiny-comic

X11 Forwarding using an SSH Reverse Tunnel

X11 Forwarding is very useful when you want to run GUI based applications on a remote machine. I needed it to run IntelliJ IDE on HPC. But while X11 forwarding can be easily enabled using the -X (or -Y) option of ssh, it doesn't work if xauth is not installed on the remote server - in my case the HPC compute nodes. In this case, ssh can be used to create a reverse tunnel from the remote server to the local machine. X11Forwarding can then be done by setting the display on the remote server as the entry port of the tunnel and making the X-server listen on the exit port of the tunnel in the local machine.

Here I'll describe how I went about creating a SSH reverse tunnel from HPC compute nodes to my local machine and used that to enable X11 Forwarding. As a prerequisite, I assume that a Display Manager that launches the X-server is installed on the local machine. Popular ones are XQuartz for macOS and XMing for Windows.

Enable X11 forwarding on local machine.

Introduction

Setting up an OS to work with xhyve can be a bit tricky, but it's not impossible. These intructions should be generally applicable to most versions of Linux.

Create a disk image file

Xhyve will use a file as a logical disk. Be sure you have the filesize you need, because growing the file later is tricky to impossible (you could try to use qcow or similar to get around this, but qcow volumes can be tricky to mount).

dd if=/dev/zero of=hdd.img bs=1g count=32 # Create a 32 gig disk. Raise 'count' as desired

	# -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
	# Copyright (c) 2016, Nicolas P. Rougier
	# Distributed under the (new) BSD License.
	# -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
	import sys, math

	def progress(value, length=40, title = " ", vmin=0.0, vmax=1.0):
	"""
	Text progress bar

	sudo apt-get remove --purge vim vim-runtime vim-gnome vim-tiny vim-common vim-gui-common

	sudo apt-get build-dep vim-gnome

	sudo apt-get install liblua5.1-dev luajit libluajit-5.1 python-dev ruby-dev libperl-dev libncurses5-dev libgnome2-dev libgnomeui-dev libgtk2.0-dev libatk1.0-dev libbonoboui2-dev libcairo2-dev libx11-dev libxpm-dev libxt-dev

	sudo rm -rf /usr/local/share/vim

	sudo rm /usr/bin/vim

	function! s:quickrun_config()
	return unite#sources#quickrun_config#quickrun_config_all()
	endfunction



	" quickrun-runner {{{

	" vimscript_all {{{
	let s:runner = {}