To ssh into Leuchner: ssh -XY radiolab@leuschner.berkeley.edu -p 31 This logs you in as the user named 'radiolab', whicch is the only user account on the Leuschner account. The password is Cud4b4ck which is the name of the professor who instigated our undergrad lab courses some decades ago (Cudaback', with the letter a replaced by the number 4. The home directory for this user is /home/radiolab and when there the prompt is radiolab@heiles:~> which means that the computer name is 'heiles'. You should immediately create a new subdirectory of your very own and use that as the base of your directory tree. YOU SHOULD NOT WRITE ANY FILES INTO /home/radiolab ! And you should not run IDL from /home/radiolab! When you run idl, you will be asked whether you want a plotting window; typing idl commands will be faster without a window. =========================== To scp files from Leuschner to your own computer (e.g., for me, to secure copy all files named *.sav to /home/heiles/leuschnerdata) on ugastro: at Leuschner, cd to the subdir where these files reside, then scp *sav heiles@ugastro.berkeley.edu:leuschnerdata or, at ugastro, cd to where you want to write these files, then: scp -P 31 radiolab@leuschner.berkeley.edu:carl/pointl/'*sav' . You should use rsync, especially when you've already copied some files; rsync copies only the ones you haven't yet copied: rsync -avzl --progress --stats -e "ssh -p 31" radiolab@leuschner.berkeley.edu:carl/pointl/'*sav' . =========================== To move the telescope at Leuschner connect to the vncserver already running on it. You can do this with ssh -L 59XX:127.0.0.1:5901 -p 31 -N -f radiolab@leuschner.berkeley.edu where XX is a two-digit number of your choice. It will return nothing if it worked. You might have to try multiple numbers. Then vncviewer -shared localhost::59XX where XX is the same two-digit number above. The password to connect to the server is: crabfast That will give you access to the shared desktop with a terminal session, on which you can run your observation script. DO NOT MOVE THE TELESCOPE THROUGH AN SSH SESSION!