Servers

The DeBlasio Lab server(s) is/are set up to be used for research conducted in the group. The following policies should be used to interact with our machine(s).

Access

Each member of the group will have an account created for them on the machines. You should change your password upon first login. Access to the machines is only available via SSH.

To change your password type passwd <username>.

xscreenie

xscreenie is a tool that maintains persistent terminal sessions between connections. Upon first log in you will see the menu with no current sessions, use option a to create your first session, you will also need to choose a session name. Using CTRL + D will close the session and remove it from the session list, CTRL + A followed by D will keep the session running and exit to the menu. note that if the server is restarted all sessions will be lost.

SSH keys

SSH keys are the recommended method for logging into the machines. To add your SSH public key to the server on your local machine run ssh-keygen and follow the prompts, then run cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub | ssh <username>@<server> "cat >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys". From then on when you type ssh <user>@<server>, you will no longer be prompted for your password.

Storage

Your home directory is for small storage (login scripts, configuration files, etc.) and not for research code or data. All users share 256G of home directory space. All other data should go on the set of hard disk drives (in /mnt/, see below for setting up these directories).

Code

All code should be committed to the group GitHub account as often as possible. While in development, this repository may be kept private, but the code will be made public when relevant papers are submitted for publication.

Data

Data should *never* be put into git repos, they can be in the same directory but should not be under version control.

Mounded Disks/mkdatadir

Within the mounted drives, you must create a directory with your username to keep your code and data. The drives themselves are not writeable other than your own directories, to create a new storage directory you will use mkdatadir. For example, if you want to create a directory to use in /mnt/disk005 you would run mkdatadir 5. This will create a new directory /mnt/disk005/<username>/.