Secure File Transfer with ECE Research Clusters

Owned by Daniel Fassinger
Last updated: Jan 11, 2024 by Chad Ziccardi
1 min read

Posted on April 12, 2011

ITS supports secure file transfer via either sftp/scp or kerberized FTP. FTP that transmits your password in clear text has been disabled.

Files may be transferred to ECE AFS areas by connecting to one of the remote access clusters.

sftp/scp

Two commonly used sftp/scp utilities are Bitvise SSH Client and PuTTY: A Free Telnet/SSH Client.

Many common software packages, such as Adobe Dreamweaver now support sftp in addition to other upload tools.

~/.bashrc should never echo output to the screen for the following reasons:

  • scp/sftp will fail

  • ssh user@hostname ‘some command’ will echo that output instead of the expected STDOUT from the ‘some command’.

NOTE: If sshkeys are used for authentication then kerberos tickets will not be receive at the time of login and it is very likely that access to write to any AFS space will not be granted. Read access for downloads will be determined by the owner of the space.

kerberized ftp

Customers who have kerberos available on their client machine and can obtain a valid ticket can use that ticket to authenticate for a secure ftp session, provide that their client supports this method.

Connecting to ECE sftp file servers

All ECE Community users accounts (user@andrew.cmu.edu) are permitted to connect to a base number of cluster computers.  Please visit the ECE Clusters page for hostnames and general information.