HowTo|
HowTo |
Use School of Computing Disk Space | Prof. Bartenstein |
The computer science department provides all Computer Science majors with up to 16G worth of network disk space for each student to use on School of Computing (SoC) hardware. When you log on to any SoC hardware, either remotely or locally (in the Engineering Building rooms G07 or N01) this disk space is mounted as your home directory on that machine.
See the School of Computing System Administration Support web page for more details.
The disk space will be kept for you for the entire span of your Computer Science enrollment. When you graduate or leave the computer science department, the disk space will be reclaimed.
Full details are available in the School of Computing Academic Student Storage and Data Retention Policy
This disk space is backed up regularly. If you lose your data, delete it by mistake, or write over good data with bad results, the backups can be recovered and restored. From your home directory, you can cd .snapshot to show all the levels of backup available. You can then copy the saved version of the files to restore something to a previous level.
You must be running Cisco Secure Access to tunnel through the BU IT Firewall and create a Virtual Private Network (VPN) in order to remotely connect to the CS Disk space. See the IT Connecting from Off Campus web page for details on how to install and run Cisco Secure Access.
I have used a tool called WinFS and SSHFS in order to mount my SoC home directory as a "remote drive" on my Windows machine. This allows me to edit the file using a full screen Windows editor such as Notepad++, but still open an SSH window and compile and run on a Linux machine. Here is the link to the download page for SSHFS-Win which has installation instructions for the tools required. I also installed SSHFS-Win Manager, which provides a full-screen GUI to set up the connection.
If you don't want to mount your Computer Science disk space on your own machine, you can use an editor which supports downloading the file to your local machine when you open the file, and uploading the file when you save it. Under the covers, these editors use SFTP to transfer files between your computer science disk and your local computer. See Editing from an Emulator for more information about Windows editors that might be useful, including Atom which can be configured to perform "remote" editing to automatically upload and download files when you edit them using ftp (or sftp).
You can download files from the Computer Science disk space to your local machine, edit them on your local machine, and then upload the edited file back to the SoC disk space before compiling and testing using Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP). Most environments support sftp in a command line window, or install you can install a tool which provides a GUI around SFTP. I use "winSCP" which is free and useful, but other free tools, such as "BitVice" are available.