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proxy

Access to the Internet from ARC-TS clusters now available

By | General Interest, News

Users of ARC-TS computing resources can now access the Internet from compute nodes.

Normally, compute nodes on ARC-TS clusters cannot directly access the Internet because they have private IP addresses. This increases cluster security while reducing the costs (IPv4 addresses are limited, and ARC-TS clusters do not currently support IPv6). However, this also means that jobs cannot install software, download files, or access databases on servers located outside of University of Michigan networks: the private IP addresses used by the cluster are routable on-campus but not off-campus.

If your work requires these tasks, there are now three ways to allow jobs running on ARC-TS clusters to access the Internet, HTTP proxying, SOCKS proxying or SSH tunneling.

The most common need for this would be for users who want to install Python or R packages from inside running jobs, or users who want to download or upload data from inside running jobs.

See Accessing the Internet from ARC-TS Compute Nodes for more information.