Setup Seaside

For this assignment, you must use your account on seaside.cs.washington.edu. See the Setup page from hw0 for more information about how to get started.

Setup cse374 on Seaside for changing permissions

We want to use drive space (memory) that can be accessed from many different machines. This will allow you flexibility with what machine you use at any given time while retaining access to your files. In order to accomplish this, we will manually mount the udrive/cse374 after logging in.

Why cse374? Why can’t we just use udrive?

For security reasonse, the CS support team who manage all these machines decide to turn off the permission edits on udrive. Therefore, we have to basically make a synced copy of udrive/cse374 and this copy can make permission edits. We will call this copy cse374.

Mounting a file server like udrive/cse374 is kind of like plugging a flash drive into your computer. If the external drive (cse374) gets unplugged, your files are still on it (in the udrive/cse374), you just have to plug it back in before you can see your files again.

Steps:

  1. Log into seaside.cs.washington.edu
  2. While in ~/ create a place to see the drive by typing mkdir cse374
  3. Mount the drive by typing sshfs sftp.udrive.uw.edu:udrive/cse374 ~/cse374. This is kind of a virtual way of “plugging it in” so you can access your files stored on the udrive/cse374 through the cse374 directory. Enter “yes” when prompted about whether you want to continue connecting, and then enter your UW NetId password.
  4. Work in cse374 by moving to that directory cd ~/cse374

Caution

A common question student has is: “I cannot find my cse374 after re-login!”

Recall that seaside is essentially a load balancer in front of two other machines: cancun(cancun.cs.washington.edu) and calgary(calgary.cs.washington.edu). As a result, you may need to repeat the steps if you could not see your cse374 after re-login.

This process allows you to use your cse374 space as a regular Linux directory. You can also access this space through a variety of other methods. UW’s instructions are here.

If you want to know more about some of these steps, you can always use man sshfs.