Running an IPython notebook server on C4

The IPython notebook is a web-based interface to Python that allows a mix of code and text, much like notebooks in systems like Mathematica. It includes built-in support for tasks like starting and stopping clusters, supports inline graphics sent directly to the web browser, and is pretty generally awesome. And you can use it to interact with C4! Follow these steps:

0. Load the anaconda module before doing anything else.
1. Log into C4 and run the setup_ipython_nbserver.sh script (available from the /share/cs-instructional/cs5220/script subdirectory). This script takes one argument, the port on which you want your notebook server to live. I recomment choosing something between 7000 and 9000 at random. At the end of this script, you will have a new Python profile.
2. Once you have created the nbserver profile, run ipython notebook --profile=nbserver to start the notebook server.
3. Create an ssh tunnel to connect a port on your local host to the port used by the notebook server. For example, if the notebook server ran on port 7777, I might run ssh -N -L 8000:localhost:7777 c4, which forwards port 7777 on C4 to port 8000 on the localhost. You will need to set up such a tunnel, because the head node is configured to block access to most ports by default for security.
4. Point a web browser to http://localhost:8000/, enter your password, and go to town.