When you login to a particular lab machine for the first time, it will create a home directory for you on the local hard disk.  If you use that same exact machine at a later date, anything you left behind should still remain.

If you have used the GSoC Departmental server in the past and have file stored there, below are a few ways to easily access your student home directory on esus:
 
1) Graphical file manager - Most GUI file managers in Linux understand sftp references.  These included but are not necessarily limited to KDE's Dolphin, Thunar, etc.  How you tell your file manager to connect to a remote system varies but the reference will usually be something like the following:
 
sftp://username-or-netid@esus.cs.montana.edu/students/username
 
Of course you replace the word username-or-netid above with your actual esus username (if you have a local account) or netid.  You will be prompted for your password and after successfully authenticating, you should be able to access your esus home directory in a somewhat local fashion.
 
2) FUSE file system access - FUSE is a file system in user space and it allows users to mount various resources as file systems.  Once such file system is sshfs.  There are a few steps to the process.  To mount a filesystem you need a directory to mount it on.  I'd recommend you make a directory named esus but it can be whatever you want.  Whatever you make it, be sure to use that in the following command lines from a terminal application like konsole or xterm:
 
cd ;    # Puts you in your own home directory just in case you were somewhere else
 
mkdir esus ;   # Creates a directory for you to mount your esus home directory on
 
sshfs username-or-netid@esus.cs.montana.edu:/students/username esus   # Does the actual sshfs mount
 
Now you should be able to access your esus files quite naturally as if they were local.  Yes, you'll have to do this whenver you login to a machine because it probably won't be there the next time you visit.
 
3) rsync - If you really want your esus files locally, you can use something like rsync to copy everything over.  It is very important that you pay attention to your rsync command and get the source and destination perfect otherwise you'll potentially replace your esus data with nothing.

Local account: rsync -avSH --progress username@esus.cs.montana.edu:/students/$username ~/
Netid account: rsync -avSH --progress netid@esus.cs.montana.edu:/students/netid/$netid/ ~/
 
Notice that the first reference is the source and the second one is the destination.   Once you are done working on the lab machine, assuming you want to push everything back you can:
 
Local account: rsync -avSH --progress ~/ username@esus.cs.montana.edu:/students/username/
Netid account: rsync -avSH --progress ~/ netid@esus.cs.montana.edu:/students/netid/$netid/

NOTE: The above were examples so to get the best experience, you should be moderately familiar with the use of the various command line tools so you can modified the parameters as needed. You don't have to do your entire home directory and can do an individual directory or directories.

Again, if you don't have the source and destination correct, you could do the opposite of what you want so pay attention and get it right.

Systems FAQ Index