Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing

To log on to a VPAC supercomputer, you will need a user account and password and a Secure Shell 2 (ssh) client. VPAC does not allow protocols such as Telnet, FTP or RSH as they insecurely send plain-text passwords over the network. Linux distributions almost always include SSH as part of the default installation as does Mac OS 10.x, although you may also wish to use the Fugu SSH client. For MS-Windows users, we recommend using the PuTTY SSH client.

If using Mac OS 10.x, you will probably want to add a terminal alias to your dock. From the Macintosh HDD and go to the Applications folder, then Utilities from within that. Terminal is in the Utilities folder. Drag it to an empty space in the Dock, and the operating system will put an alias there. If you are using a graphic interface for Linux, like GNOME or KDE, you may wish to do the same with one of the terminal clients and panels.

If you're using MS-Windows, download PuTTY. In the 'Host Name' box, enter the server you want to connect to (e.g., tango.vpac.org) and select SSh from the 'Connection type' radio button. Verify the host key when connecting for the first time. With Mac or Linux simply open the terminal client and enter your username and the machine you wish to connect to, followed by the password when connected. For example;

ssh [your username]@tango.vpac.org

To move files to and from the supercomputer and one's desktop you need to use an SCP (secure copy protocol) or SFTP (secure file transfer protocol) over SSh. If you are using Linux or Mac, you will be able to do this with the standard command-line interface with the general procedure of;

scp account@source.address:/path/to/file account@destination.address:/path/to/file

If one is running the command the source or destination machine the account information does not have to be entered for that machine.

If you are using MS-Windows, we recommend using WinSCP, or the PuTTY Secure Copy client PSCP.

WinSCP (Windows Secure Copy) is a grahic open source SFTP (and FTP) client for MS-Windows. It uses SSh and supports SCP (secure copy). It can also provide basic file management and remote editing.

Examples:

1) "Putting" a single file.

scp data.txt username@tango.vpac.org:data.txt

This will copy the text file from the Desktop machine to tango.vpac.org in the user's home directory (/home/user/mydata.txt)

2) "Getting" a single file.

scp username@tango:data.txt ./data.txt
(On a Linux or Mac system)

3) "Putting" an entire directory

scp -r datadirectory username@tango.vpac.org:datadirectory/

This is a recursive "put"; it will copy over the entire directory and any subdirectories.

4) "Getting" an entire directory

scp -r username@tango.vpac.org:/datadirectory ./datadirectory/
(On Linux or Mac systems)

There is also a handy program called rysnc which provides an incremental secure file transfer. In other words, it only replaces those parts of your files on your destination machine when they have been modified on the source machine. This makes transfers of large numbers of files a great deal faster.

Example:
rsync -a -e ssh source/ username@tango.vpac.org:/home/user/destination/

This would move all files from the folder 'source/' to the folder 'destination/' on a remote machine, ensuring you have acopy of the two directories. The files are transferred in -a "archive" mode, which ensures that symbolic links, devices, attributes, permissions, ownerships etc, are preserved in the transfer. Be careful with those trailing slashes on the source argument - leaving it out will create an additional subdiretory underneath that specified on the destination. Finally, the command uses ssh (-e ssh) to determine the protocol that rsync uses to make the connections.

Putty is available from:
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/

WinSCP is available from:
http://winscp.net

Fugu is available from:
http://rsug.itd.umich.edu/software/fugu/

More information on OpenSSh and the latest version can be found at:
http://www.openssh.com/

A tutorial on using rsync as a backup tool
http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots/

Rsync for MS-Windows
http://optics.ph.unimelb.edu.au/help/rsync/rsync_pc1.html