Shared File Systems
A file server configuration is available on GitHub. Currently, we no longer run the file server, but can launch it again on demand, or users can use the existing configuration to launch their own file server with minimal changes.
The Aristotle file server is accessible at 128.84.8.135. If you plan to use applications on a different cloud, or use the application from many instances on a large cloud, this solution will not work well. Instead, see Scalable File Access.
Currently we have NFS and SMB (via Samba) supported for our applications server. NFS is generally faster than SMB, but is difficult to support on Windows clients. Users may also be interested in quickly accessing files without setting up a specific server; if they are running Linux, they can quickly use SSHFS as long as the SSH port (22) is open and SSH server is running. Note that SSHFS will be somewhat slower than even SMB.
- MATLAB can be served from this system, or you can use a MATLAB-ready image.
You can mount Aristotle's shared apps with the following command, where you can substitute /mnt/aristotleApps with a local directory of your preference:
sudo mount -t nfs 128.84.8.135:/export/aristotle/apps /mnt/aristotleApps
The samba share is /apps; you can mount //128.84.8.135/apps as a guest user. You'll probably want to map the share to a network drive if you are going to be running applications from it. Open up the Windows File Explorer or 'My Computer', and on the left hand side of the screen, you can do the following:
After following the instructions given by Windows and entering in the above share address, you should see a drive appear under 'Network Location', as in the image.
Read only access should be granted to the subnet 128.84.8.0/22 (Red Cloud). Write access for NFS is enabled via two elastic IPs: 128.84.8.65 and 128.84.8.85 on project shm7_0016. If you need to use one of these instances and do not have a user, please contact Brandon Barker. Alternatively you may request temporary access to one of the elastic IPs.
If using SMB/Samba instead, you can request a user be added with write permissions on the file server and connect to the 'apps' share with a writable user; see the syncPasswordsByPam option in samba.nix for a description of how this is done.
The file server runs NixOS with this configuration.
There are few images available for installing software on shm7_0016 with various utilities and mounts already set up - contact Brandon if you need an account:
- (Windows 7) Brandon_Win7_Test (i-96b56a29)
- Ext2Fsd - for mounting ext2/3/4 partitions (currently configured in read-only mode)
- WinIso - for mounting ISO images
- Possibly add Samba integration with our active directory server.
- Consider optimizing Samba read speed.