File Services (Access, Storage and Transfer)
Home Directories
Home directories give everyone with a CSE account a finite amount of storage. The amount (and where it is stored) depends on what type of account you have. For information on how to access these folders from various platforms, see the quick links in the upper right.
[+] Instructional Accounts
[-] Instructional Accounts
Your Windows and Linux home directories are one and the same. On Linux, these folders can be reached at /homes/iws/<csenetid>. On Windows, your "Z:" drive is mapped to the same folder via \\tanaga\<csenetid>. In addition to the Z: on Windows, your Desktop, Downloads, Music, My Documents, My Pictures, and My Videos are stored in your home directory at Z:\WindowsFolders (/homes/iws/<csenetid>/WindowsFolders).
[+] Quota
[-] Quota
There is a 5GB quota in effect for home directories of undergrads on CSE instructional systems. If your quota is exceeded, you have 7 days to drop below the limit. After 7 days, you are prevented from writing anything until you have deleted enough files to drop below the quota. You will see messages that say "Disc quota exceeded." Enter quota -v on a Linux system to see what your quota is.
If you cannot even log into your Linux account, i.e. your dotfiles are doing something that tries to write a file and causes a fatal error, try the following: Log into your Windows account and use Windows explorer to delete files from Z: until you are below your Linux quota.
[+] Research Accounts
[-] Research Accounts
Your Windows and Linux home directories are one and the same. On Linux, these folders can be reached at /homes/gws/<csenetid>. On Windows, your "Z:" drive is mapped to the same folder via \\<homeserver>\<csenetid>, where <homeserver> is the file server on which your home directory resides (one of barb, echo, or coco). Please note that your Desktop, Downloads, Music, My Documents, My Pictures, and My Videos on Windows are NOT stored in your home directory, and are instead stored on your local machine.
[+] Quota
[-] Quota
There is no set quota. Currently on the research UNIX and Windows servers, the policy is as follows: the "neighbors" in each home directory partition are mainly responsible for how space is divided up there. Every weekend these partitions are examined, and if certain overall and individual usage thresholds are exceeded, a message is sent to all users stating this policy and adding:
Excessives: you know who you are; good neighbors: you also know who they are.
If you need additional disk storage for projects you are working on, please try to get space in a /projects directory through the sponsor of your account.
Every once in a while a home directory partition fills up. When that happens, an email showing the results of an on-demand run of disk usage is usually all that's required to get files deleted. Once or twice a year, though, we need to take the ultimate step of "expiring" a perp's accounts in order to keep a partition from re-filling.
So, if your programs make really big files really fast, and they have the "sorcerer's apprentice" attribute of recreating themselves when they are killed, don't be surprised to find your account temporarily disabled---and perhaps your disk-partition "neighbors" at your office door with pitchforks and torches.
User-Level Group Management
In the interest of making life easier for everyone, the CSE Lab has developed a software suite, collectively known as GrpAdmin, that allows user-level management of Unix groups and group memberships, either via CLI or web interface.
CSE Anonymous FTP Service
If you are in need of transferring files between you and remote users for your research, but sending or getting them through email or setting your own ftp server would be troublesome, you can use CSE anonymous ftp service. The service is available only to research users.
[+] How it works
[-] How it works
The anonymous ftp service at ftp.cs.washington.edu or at URL ftp://ftp.cs.washington.edu allows any Internet user to retrieve and/or deposit files in a specified area without the need to have a CSE account. The ftp user can use a ftp command to access the service with anonymous as the account name, and an email address as its password. A line command such as wget or fetch or a web browser can also be used to access anonymous ftp files by the URL (please see man pages or help facility of individual commands for details.)
On CSE systems, the ftp directories are accessible via its Unix global path /cse/ftp/, where you can copy files into and out of it. On the other hand, an anonymous ftp user can only transfer files in one direction in each ftp directory. That is a file can be deposited but can not be retrieved and vice versa. This is to prevent our server from being a dumping ground for pirated software and other things to be shared by other anonymous ftp users.
[+] Short-term use
[-] Short-term use
To use the service, there are a couple of self-serve directories that you can use right away for small-size files and for a short duration. They are incoming and outgoing directories for ftp users to deposit and retrieve files respectively. The directories are accessible to CSE users as /cse/ftp/incoming and /cse/ftp/outgoing respectively.
For transferring file to you, tell your user to put file in incoming and you can get the file from /cse/ftp/incoming.
For transferring file to ftp user, you can put your files in /cse/ftp/outgoing. If you are concerned the files might be copied by non-intended ftp users, you might want to protect the files by creating an unbrowsable directory under /cse/ftp/outgoing, and putting the files there.
Once you copy your files into the directory, then you tell your ftp user what the path is. With the example above, the path would be /outgoing/myftp/myfile or URL ftp://ftp.cs.washington.edu/outgoing/toftp/myfile.
You can't remove files that are not owned by you so you can't remove files deposited by a ftp user after you have copied the file. However, you do not need to worry. When the files are older than 5 days, they are automatically removed.
[+] Long-term use
[-] Long-term use
If you need to use ftp on a regular basis such as you have a URL of your project file published in a paper or you have large files or large amount of files that can't be handled comfortably by the server's disk, you can send a request to support@cs.
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