Research Network

About The research network

IMSS is working with the Provost's office to implement a research network on campus. Its initial purpose is the facilitate data transfers between machines at a higher speed and with less exposure than on the public network. It is still limited in scope, but is currently in testing. If your lab is interested in the beta period, please let us know and we can reach out to your group to see viability and time frames.

Mounting the central cluster storage from the research network

Currently this method only works for machines already connected to the research network.

We are in the midst of putting in new protocol gateways to facilitate access to the central cluster filesystem from research network connected clients. The current plan is to only support authenticated connections to the cluster to mitigate security concerns.

Servers:

From the research network there are 4 IP addresses you can connect to:

10.79.1.92

10.79.1.93

10.79.1.94

10.79.1.95

These addresses are virtual IP addresses on the servers and will move around based on availability and load. If mounting from multiple machines, it is best to use different IP addresses to allow the system to balance the load.

Windows:

From a windows machine you would mount \\10.79.1.92\mountpoint with your username in the format: ITS\username. This will ensure it is in the correct workgroup for authentication when connecting.

Example of mounting a home directory:

\\ipaddress\homes\username

Example of mounting a group directory:

\\ipadress\groups\groupname_mountpoint

MacOS

From a macintosh, you mount by selecting "Connect to Server" from the "Go" menu item in the finder. In the location field you would use (you can swap out the ip address):

smb://10.79.1.93/homes/username

And for your group directory:

smb://10.79.1.93/groups/groupname

Linux:

From a linux machine you can use the samba tools to mount it. Below is an example for mounting your home directory:

mount -t cifs //10.79.1.93/homes/username/ -o username=username,domain=ITS

Mount the group directory (uid is the local system uid you are mounting as):

mount -t cifs //10.79.1.94/groups/groupname_mountpoint/ -o uid=0,username=username,domain=ITS

You can also check the available mount using:

smbclient -L //10.79.1.95/ -U ITS/username

On a Red Hat or CentOS based system, these programs are part of the samba-client and cifs-utils packages. On a debian based system they are in the smbclient and cifs-utils packages.