Introduction

The Centre for Molecular and Biomolecular Informatics applications provide a set of software applications which may be run from the central database but displayed on the user's screen wherever in the world that may be. This is useful for several reasons:

Sadly, it's not necessarily so simple. The user may (and probably should) be on a firewalled network. Firewalls by their nature prevent this sort of remote application display. They can be configured to allow the connections through but in practice getting your firewall administrator to sort this out may be a lot of trouble and present security problems.

This document presents an alternative means, using an SSH tunnel which may be achieved entirely by an ordinary user. This method has the added bonus of encrypting all data in transit and of optionally compressing the data to speed it over slow networks.

We've attempted to keep things as non-technical as possible. However a more technical explanation of this is included, see Section 6.

Gavin McCullagh 2004-05-07