Clemson:Accessing Files on CpSc Servers

From Linux 101, The beginner's guide to all things Linux.

[edit] Introduction

There are two ways to access your files on the Computer Science department machines. SFTP and fish. SFTP works much like FTP and clients are available and abundant for it. The fish protocol works exclusively in KDE and allows you to access the files on any machine that allows SSH logins and will run Perl.

[edit] Accessing Your Home Directory Via SFTP

To get to your files simply using the command line simply use

sftp access.cs.clemson.edu

You will need to accept the key that the server sends you and then type in your password. This method does not work, however, if your user name on your home computer is not the same as your CS department login. For instance, running the above command as root will begin an attempt to login to the CS machines as root. This does not make Ed Harris happy. To avoid conflict you can include your login name with the sftp command like so:

sftp eharris@access.cs.clemson.edu

Make sure you change the login name to what is applicable to you, otherwise Ed might take it personally.

Now you can upload/download files.

[edit] Accessing Your Home Directory Via Fish

KDE has made accessing files across ssh connections disgustingly simple. In Konqueror type in the address:
fish://username@access.cs.clemson.edu/home/username/
After you accept the server key and enter your password you will be presented with a view of your home directory on the remote machine just as if it were on your own computer.

As an added bonus you can use the fish iosocket (as it is referred to by the KDE people) from within many applications. Anything that uses the KDE file selector for opening and saving files can do so straight from access.cs.clemson.edu by using the fish iosocket. For instance, from within KDevelop you can load the file "fish://access.cs.clemson.edu/home/username/program.c" and then every time you hit the "Save" button the file is saved on the CS department server.