Working remote – X11 Forward, Putty, Windows, Gateway

Sometimes I need matlab/rstudio/spyder but with access to the university network. One way is to run matlab/rstudio/spyder on the university computers, but get the X (=Graphics) display on my local windows machine.

Because there is a gateway in between, I first need to tunnel the gateway to a university working computer, then use a second putty session to ssh right through the tunnel directly to the target computer.

These are the steps I need to do:

– Putty: ssh to gateway.university:22;  Go to SSH-Tunnel and put source-port: 2222 (this is your local port you gonna target the second session). destination: remote-pc-that-runs-matlab:22

– Putty again: ssh to localhost:2222 with X11 forward enabled and “xming” installed

and perfect (but sometimes slow) remote-X11-forwarding. For the future I want to check out rdb to remotely control the session. This could be a quite useful in many cases because my programs are usually running anyway 🙂