You may or may not be aware that Stanford gives students, staff, and faculty members AFS (short for Andrew file system) space. Using your AFS space, you can store files on Stanford servers and access these files remotely from any computer.
When you need to share files with friends or transfer files between cluster computers and your own computer, AFS space can be a great option.
Overview
File Size: As much as your AFS space can hold, generally under 200MB
Pros: Well supported by Stanford computing environment, WWW folder makes sharing files over the web very easy
Cons: Not useful for large files
Required Software: No software download required if using cluster computers. Fetch or SecureFX if using own computer.
Checking AFS Quota
First of all, you might want to find out how much AFS space you have available. Read how on the MMS Wiki.
By default, you have 200MB of AFS quota. However, some courses grant students additional AFS space for the quarter in which they are enrolled.
On a Cluster Computer
With the exception of some stations, most computers in Stanford clusters automatically mount your AFS space upon login. That is, the desktop that appears is your AFS desktop and your AFS home folder is easily accessible.
To access your AFS home folder on a Mac, open a Finder window and click on your home folder, which will show up as a house icon followed by your SUNet ID.
To access your home folder on a PC, look for the desktop shortcut with a house icon that says My AFS Home.
WWW folder
The WWW folder is a convenient place to store files to download later on. Simply drag files into the WWW folder.
Open a browser on any computer and type "http://www.stanford.edu/~[yourSUNetID]/" in the URL bar. You will see a list of the files in your WWW folder. Right click and select Save Link As (or its equivalent) to save the files to your computer.
Notice in this picture how the contents in the WWW folder match the contents on the page:
I have personally found this to be a good way of sharing full-sized versions of photos with friends. I simply bundle the files into a single .zip file, upload it to my Stanford webspace, and send out the link via email.
On Your Own Computer
You can also access the files on your AFS space from your own computer using an FTP client by connecting to a Stanford server, such as elaine. We recommend using Fetch for Macs and SecureFX for PCs. Both are available for download on the ESS homepage, which also contains configuration instructions for both.
Once connected, you can move files to and from your AFS space just as you would to and from any folder on your computer.
Here are some screenshots of the Fetch and SecureFX interfaces:
Read more about your AFS space on the ITS homepage.
2 comments:
Great entry, Jean! A lot of people don't know that they have an AFS space, let alone how to use it.
I just wanted to mention that the Open a browser on any computer and type "http://www.stanford.edu/~[yourSUNetID]/" trick will only work if you do not have an index.html or index.htm page in your WWW folder. If there is one, it will show that page instead of the file listing.
However, this is not always detrimental. Some times, you might not want everyone to be able to see the files in your WWW folder, and in that case, you can put a dummy (blank should suffice) index.htm file in your WWW folder.
Yeah, I personally have an index.html page up to prevent people from seeing the contents of my WWW folder, but I decided to leave that piece of info out to keep things simple.
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