Ask SIPB - January 15, 2003

To connect to Athena using SSH, SFTP, or SCP, you can connect to a few different machines:

Normal: athena.dialup.mit.edu

You can also connect to private Athena machines, if the administrator has allowed you to do so.

The www directory is primarily intended to be used as a web page. Anything you put in that directory is publicly accessible, and can be accessed with the URLs:

http://web.mit.edu/username/www/ and
http://www.mit.edu/~username/

The Public directory is primarily intended to be used to share files through Athena. Anything you put in that directory is also publicly accessible. To get to someone's Public directory, type:

athena% cd ~username/Public

Public directories can also be accessed at the URL: http://web.mit.edu/username/Public/

If for some reason your Public or www directories are missing or misconfigured, you can restore them with the following:

athena% cd
athena% mkdir Public
athena% mkdir www
athena% fs sa -dir Public -acl system:anyuser rl
athena% fs sa -dir www -acl system:anyuser rl

With either program, you can simply drag files between your local file listing and the remote Athena file listing, and the file will be transfer, just as you would with a regular FTP client.

With FileZilla, you must have Kerberos tickets, which you can obtain with Leash32. If you do not have Kerberos tickets, you will not be able to connect.

SCP is available on Unix machines, including Athena. Third-party software, such as PSCP (included with Putty, an SSH client), will also allow you to use SCP on other operating systems.

To use SCP you first specify which file you want to transfer, then specify your user name and host you are transfering to, and finally the intended location of the file:

scp foo.txt username@athena.dialup.mit.edu:/afs/athena.mit.edu/user/u/s/username/foo.txt

How can I use AFS to transfer files between my personal computer and Athena?

To access your fileshare from an Athena machine using these instructions, you will need root access to the machine. There are other methods which work without root access, using the program smbclient, which we will not cover. To become root on an Athena machine, type "su" at the athena% prompt, and enter the root password. To find the root password on a public cluster machine, run "tellme root" at the prompt. For a non-public machine, you must find out the root password from an administrator. Once you are root, your prompt should change to something like "bash-2.05a#".

Once you are root, you can mount your windows fileshare using the smbmount command. First you need to create a mount point, an empty directory where the share will appear. The name of the mountpoint doesn't matter, but it must be a new, empty directory. For example:

bash-2.05a# mkdir /tmp/windows

Now use smbmount to mount the fileshare. smbmount takes two arguments. The first is the path to the "service" you are mounting. The second is the mountpoint you created above. To mount this share, run:

bash-2.05a# smbmount //machinename.mit.edu/sharename /tmp/windows

This will prompt you for a password. By default, smbmount will use your username to connect. To use a different username, add "-o username=myname" to the end of the smbmount command, replacing myname with the username you want to use.