Workshops¶

On this page we will show you how to create a workshop, where to get more information on your workshop and also some good general practices.

Info

To manage your workshop via the portal, you will need an approved SimpleVM project where you chose that you would like to conduct a workshop. Only admins of the project are allowed to manage workshops.

Create a new workshop¶

We offer you the ability to manage your workshops more conveniently. You may create a workshop and start multiple virtual machines for your participants with just a few clicks.

You will find the New Workshop button on the sidebar (a SimpleVM project for workshops which you are an admin of is required for this button to show).

new_workshop_button

Here you may choose your SimpleVM project and then either select an existing workshop or create a new one. There is no limit on how many workshops you may create with your SimpleVM project.

create__or_select_workshop

Note

The shortname of your workshop will be used, inter alia, for naming of virtual machines and research environment links.

Start virtual machines for your participants¶

Once you select a workshop, you will see a form similiar to the New Instance form.

new_instance_workshop You will need to select a flavor, an image, a research-environment and the participants you want to start a virtual machine for. You may also start virtual machines for your admins and at participant selection you will see an icon if a virtual machine is already started for the participant. You may start as many virtual machines for a participant as you have resources.

select_users The machines and the research-environment links will be named automatically and will have the form <WORKSHOP-SHORTNAME><PARTICIPANT-LASTNAME><PARTICIPANT-FIRSTNAME> and will be truncated to a maximum of 25 characters.
We will place the public SSH key of every admin of your project on every started machine, so that every admin of your project has SSH access to every started machine.
The research-environment will be accessable by the participant and the admin who started the virtual machine.

Once you selected everything you need and confirmed the checkboxes at the bottom of the for, you may start the virtual machines and you will get taken to the instance overview, where you will find more information about the status of the virtual machine.

vm_overview

Workshop overview¶

You may find an overview of your created workshops at your project overview. Here you will find the participants name, the participants preferred E-Mail address and the link to the research environment of the participants virtual machine.

workshop_overview

Best Practices¶

Preparation¶

It is advised to add your participants to your project a couple of days beforehand. This will help with a smoother start of your workshop. They will need to have or make an account for the de.NBI portal in order for you to add them. If you are not sure if they have an account you can send your participants the wiki site where the registration process is explained.

SSH keys¶

Info

If your participants do not need to login to their machines with SSH, please ignore this paragraph.

There are many users to whom the concept of SSH keys is foreign and therefore it is important to explain the users the basic concept of SSH keys, in case that they have no prior knowledge about them. Furthermore, it is important to tell users to pay attention if they create a key pair using the de.NBI portal. While the public key is stored on the portal, they need to save the private key on their computer themselves.
As workshops tend to have a lot of new content and participants may be overwhelmed, it is important to explain them these steps patiently and make sure everyone follows through, as they will not be able to access their machines later on, if they lose their private key.

Tip

Make sure the admins of your project also have their SSH key set.

Trouble Shooting¶

If you experience troubles, have feedback on our services or have a special request please do not hesitate to contact us under cloud-portal-support@denbi.de.