Fileservers

EECS has a variety of file servers for different purposes. For example, to provide storage for individuals (home directories); for research groups’ papers and other documents (network “shares”) and administrators; for experimental data; etc. These uses are described in the service descriptions on the pages linked to below.

The requirements for these purposes vary – for example, in terms of performance, amount of storage, security/accessibility and backup policy. To help people remember what policies apply to which file services we tend to support differing policies on different servers. Accordingly this document is structured around the servers rather than the services.

There are a variety of ways to access the file servers, including NFS, SMB and SFTP.

See also

Staff Server

The School has upgraded and consolidated its 2 staff file servers into one new one (“tofu.eecs.qmul.ac.uk”) , it uses RAID storage and back-up to tape in different School buildings; It provides home directories to staff and research student users of the dual-boot Windows/Linux managed desktops; It also provide storage, with tape back-up, for each research group (up to 4TB each) for shared documents and code (svn, cvs) repositories. For more information about access methods to these shares please contact systems@eecs.

  • NFS (from a “managed” desktop or a compute server): e.g. /import/imc/, /import/mmv/
  • SMB (from a managed Windows desktop): e.g. \\tofu\IMC or \\tofu\vision

For security reasons, none of the staff servers’ storage is visible on the EECS student service. Instead, members of staff and research students get second home directories on student service machines. These second home directories are visible on the NFS-enabled staff networks as e.g. /homes.itl/keithc/ on a managed Linux machine.

 

Bulk Research Storage

EECS has a has several RAIDed file servers (“landin”, “orsova” and “oriana”) largely funded by research groups from grant income, with some pump-priming money from School resources. There are many terabytes of storage. It is not taped. Each research group gets just the storage that it funds. There is a considerable RAID tax necessary to achieve reasonable reliability.

For more information see the