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Remote beastiary

One of the main use cases of beastiary is accessing files on a remote server e.g. a high performance computer (HPC). Here we walk though the process of running beastiary on the University of Melbourne's HPC Spartan (although these steps apply to any remote server). This assumes beastiary is already installed on the remote server (e.g. pip3 --user install beastiary).

$ ssh [email protected]

Welcome to Spartan, the general purpose High Performance Computer system.

The easiest way to access beastiary on a remote server is to use the --share flag when starting beastiary. This will generate a public link that can be accessed from any machine.

$ beastiary --share    

🐙🐁 <span style="color: #3498db;">STARTING BEASTIARY</span> 🐁🐙

Go to: <span style="color: green;">http://127.0.0.1:5000/login?token=8e02d06b-d30e-4a89-8476-fb22712a31b3</span>

If prompted enter token: 8e02d06b-d30e-4a89-8476-fb22712a31b3

Creating public shareable link...

Beastiary is now publicly accessible at: <span style="color: green;">https://grave-profits-stories-idaho.trycloudflare.com</span>

When running beastiary with the --share it will use with-cloudflared to create a public link that will redirect public traffic to the local beastiary server. The public link will only work while beastiary is running. If you close the beastiary server you will have to generate a new public link.

Warning

We strongly recommend against disabling security when using the --share flag. We try to make Beastiary as secure as possible, but it is still a public link and there are bad actors.

If you want to access beastiary on a remote server without creating a public link then you will have to use an SSH tunnel.

SSH tunnel

To connect to beastiary on the HPC we must first establish an SSH tunnel so that the port beastiary is running on can be connected to our local machine. We will accomplish this using the -L ssh flag. Connect to the HPC using your normal ssh command, but add -L 5000:localhost:5000. The -L flag tells ssh to forward requests to port 5000 on your local machine to port 5000 on the HPC. 

$ ssh -L 5000:localhost:5000 [email protected]

Welcome to Spartan, the general purpose High Performance Computer system.

Note

If you wanted to run beastiary on a different port on the HPC (i.e. if 5000 is occupied) you could change the 5000 to your desired port e.g. 5001. 

ssh -L 5001:localhost:5001 [email protected]
Then start beastiary using the desired port. 
beastiary --port 5001

Start beastiary

Now that you are logged into the HPC start beastiary using the beastiary command. Once beastiary has started you can go to http://127.0.0.1:5000 on your local machine to access remote log files. 

$ beastiary

🐙🐁 <span style="color: #3498db;">STARTING BEASTIARY</span> 🐁🐙

Go to: <span style="color: green;">http://127.0.0.1:5000/login?token=8e02d06b-d30e-4a89-8476-fb22712a31b3</span>

If prompted enter token: 8e02d06b-d30e-4a89-8476-fb22712a31b3

Note

Because beastiary is running on the remote server you will have to specify paths to log files as they are on the server.

Reconnecting

If you are using ssh tunnelling to connect to Beastiary running on the remote server then you should be able to reopen the forwarded port e.g. http://127.0.0.1:5000 while Beastiary is running and the ssh connection remains open. Closing the ssh session or stopping Beastiary will prevent you from reconnect, but that’s expected. If you close the window simply go to http://127.0.0.1:5000 again and re-enter the login token.