Application Portals

Sun Secure Global Desktop

The web browser method of access we recommend for connecting to iceberg is provided by a piece of Java based software titled 'Sun Global Desktop  (SGD)' .  SGD allows running 'published' applications directly from the browser window thus making it unnecessary to be familiar with Linux. While the rest of the iceberg applications can be initiated after starting an interactive job session first.

 This applications portal does not require a VPN connection and can therefore be accessed from anywhere using a Windows, Linux or MAC computer with little or no Linux knowledge.

If you have an iceberg username, just click the link below to  start accessing iceberg and the applications that are available on it.

                                           
                                  Connect to iceberg

 If this is the first time you are using SGD from your browser, you will witness an initialisation phase of setting up the JAVA environment which may take sometime and ask a number of security questions.  You must answer positively to all the security questions that follows.  
On rare occasions, your browser may need to update its version of the JAVA plugin. In that case after the installation clear all the cookies and restart your browser. 

Once you have managed to login, you will see a window with Applications on the Left Hand Panel.  

You will need to click the arrow to the left of Applications to cascade it open to see the list of 'published' applications. At the time of writing this document we had Matlab, Maple and Ansys published on the applications portal. Clicking on an application will start it up.
If the application you wish to use is not on that list, you can still run it by first selecting the ( Interactive job ) icon to start up an interactive window and then typing the name of the application in that window. 

File transfers to/from iceberg. 

If you are using this portal to run applications on iceberg with very little or no Linux experience and you need to work with files, a secure-file-transfer client will be handy.  

File transfer clients such as WinSCP or CoreFTP help transfer files to/from iceberg, edit files, rename files, move files or delete files while they are on iceberg. 

 However, a word of warning about the files and directories on a Linux file system.  As a general rule, any file or directory that starts with a dot [.] in its name is a hidden file and should not be deleted, renamed or edited without due consideration.  Unfortunately most file transfer clients make these files visible thus making it easy to delete them by accident.