- Accessing MDSS via a Web Browser (MDSSWeb)
You can use the web interface by just going to
https://www.mdss.iu.edu/. See the
MDSSWeb Knowledge Base Article for more details.
- Accessing MDSS via HSI
The
Hierarchical Storage Interface (HSI) Software
is installed on the CS unix systems and can be used
to access the MDSS.
To use this software, just run
hsi and you should be prompted for a "Principal",
which is just your username. Then you'll be prompted for your password.
Once you are logged in, you are ready to issue hsi commands. You can
just run help to get a list of commands or see the
HSI KB entry
for more information. Hsi is similar to ftp
but gives you much more flexibilty with the ability to do things
you can do from a shell, such as moving, copying, and renaming files
and using wildcards.
The KB Article on HSI provides
much more detailed information about how to use hsi. This page describes
mechanisms for generating data via a pipe and storing it on MDSS as well
as a discussion on alternate authentication mechanisms. Be sure and pay
close attention to the Class of Service you are using and
take note of the
Related KB Article so your
large backups do not fail.
Here is an example showing how you can use tar on the local CS system
and save the output to MDSS using hsi:
cd /some/directory
hsi 'put cos=3 copies=2 coslist-large "|tar cf - ." : some_directory.tar'
- Accessing MDSS via HTAR
The HSI package also includes htar which provides a convenient way
to read and write tar archives to the MDSS. It behaves just like the normal
tar command but read and writes tar archive files to and from MDSS.
For example, you can create a tar archive of some directory with:
htar cf archive.tar some_directory
The resulting tar file, archive.tar, will be written to MDSS. Similarly,
you can extract files from a tar file on MDSS with:
htar xf archive.tar
Each time you run htar you will be prompted for your username (aka. Principal)
and password.
As with hsi, see the
The KB Article on HSI for information
on alternate authentication methods available with htar.
- Accessing MDSS via SFTP or SCP
You can use standard SSH clients to access MDSS using the hostname sftp.mdss.iu.edu. See
the Associated KB Entry for details.
- Accessing MDSS via PFTP
You can access MDSS using pftp as follows:
- Obtain a kerberos ticket by running kinit. On the CS linux machines
the kerberbos binaries are in /usr/kerberos/bin so you should be sure this
is in your path. This should be in your path by default for CS accounts but
you may need to add this if you explicitly set your path. When you run kinit
you will be prompted for your IU kerberos password.
- Connect to hpss.iu.edu:
pftp hpss.iu.edu
If you get an error like this:
init_sec_context: (krb5) Miscellaneous failure: No credentials cache found
then this probably means that you didn't load your kerberos ticket before running
pftp. Please run kinit to load your ticket.
If you don't see the credentials error but are still prompted for a password
like this:
Name (hpss.iu.edu:usename):
then this probably means you are using the wrong version of pftp. Note
that there is the standard linux ftp client (/usr/bin/pftp) and the
pftp client for use with HPSS (/usr/local/bin/pftp) on the system so check
which version you are using.
When this all works properly, you
should be automatically logged into HPSS when you issues the pftp command.
Please see the Associated Knowledge Base Entry for further details about using pftp.
Anyone interested in using the MDSS is encouraged to check out
the
