Site /

MountingDrives

Mounting is the process of making a file system available for browsing on your local machine. When your local machine starts, your home folder is automatically mounted. The home folder resides on the physical hard drive on your local machine, and mounting tells the computer to make the files on the hard drive accessible at /home/localusername.

You can mount folders found on other computers, like CAEDM or the supercomputer, onto your local machine so that you can interact with them as you would files stored on your local hard drive. The process below explains how to do this.

Explanation of Variables

localusername is your username on the local machine
fslusername is your username on the supercomputer
CAEDMusername is your CAEDM username
sc is the name of a folder you create on the local machine in your home directory (e.g. /home/localusername/sc). It can be something else.
jdrive is the name of a folder you create on the local machine in your home directory (e.g. /home/localusername/jdrive). It can be something else.

Mount Your Supercomputer Folder to Your Local Machine

Make a folder for the mount point. (The name sc is used below, but it can be anything you desire)

mkdir /home/localusername/sc

Run the following command

sshfs -o follow_symlinks fslusername@ssh.rc.byu.edu:/fslhome/fslusername /home/localusername sc

After running this command, you will be prompted for your supercomputer password and then the Duo verification code.
Because of the two-factor authentication (Duo verification code), this step cannot be automated to occur anytime you restart the computer or log in. You therefore need to remount your super computer share each time the local machine restarts or anytime you log out of your account on the local machine. I suggest never logging out of the local machine. Simply lock the screen when you leave using Ctrl + Alt + L.
You should now see your super computer files when you navigate to /home/username/sc on the local machine.

Mount Your CAEDM J-Drive to Your Local Machine

Make a folder for the mount point. (The name j is used below, but it can be anything you desire)

mkdir /home/localusername/jdrive

Run the following command

sshfs -o follow_symlinks CAEDMusername@ssh.et.byu.edu: /home/localusername/jdrive

After running this command, you will be prompted for your CAEDM password.
You could automate this by setting up ssh keys and placing this command in your .bashrc file.

Unmounting

You can unmount the supercomputer and/or CAEDM file systems using the fusermount -u command. For example, if the supercomputer folder on the local machine is named sc, you can unmount it using:

fusermount -u /home/localusername/sc