H: drive on cluster

Introduction

The H: is principally the following St. Andrews network drive:

cfs.st-andrews.ac.uk/shared/med_research/res

One can of course simply copy files over to the cluster from the H: drive, but for large datasets, this is costly in terms of diskspace. An alternative is "mount" this network drive on marvin, which avods the duplication. While not as simple as copying, the efficiency gains make it worth it. The procedure is documented here.

Mounting H: depends on individual authentication, and so cannot be mounted system wide. Every user, if they want it, must do it manually.

The key to this is the Gnome Virtual File system, gvfs.

It is possible to get the h: drive mounted on the marvin frontend, mainly because it is running gnome.

However, the nodes are not, so currently they cannot mount the H: drive.

This means when working with the raw data, only the marvin.q can be used.

Methods

Two tools are used for this: gvfs and fuse

• a user must be a member of group "fuse"
• a gvfs daemon must be running under user gdm: the system administrator should ensure this.
• Script to use is

#!/bin/bash
export $(dbus-launch)
gvfs-mount smb://cfs.st-andrews.ac.uk/shared/med_research/res
/usr/libexec/gvfs-fuse-daemon ~/.gvfs

which can be launched as normal user,

Notes

• gvfs-mount -l seems useless, reports nothing.