Using Vault. William E. Mihalo, PhD. Senior HPC Systems Engineer Academic and Research Technologies

Transcription

1 William E. Mihalo, PhD Senior HPC Systems Engineer Academic and Research Technologies

2 What is Vault? Vault is a collaborative research data storage system available to faculty and post-docs at Northwestern Vault is based on the Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning system (WebDAV) Vault runs on Windows (XP and 7), Mac OS X and Linux operating systems The first 50 GB of storage are available at no cost, with no time limit; an additional 100 GB of storage is available for $76 for four years of storage

3 How does Vault differ from public online storage systems? Free for the first 50 GB; additional storage can be purchased at minimal cost Vault stores your data in the Evanston and Chicago computing centers to ensure daily backup in case of emergency Vault is operating system agnostic it is available from Windows, Mac and Linux operating systems

4 Who can use Vault? Faculty Post-docs

5 What can you store in Vault? Documents especially documents that are being written on a collaborative basis Spreadsheets Small data sets

6 What should not be stored in Vault? Sensitive data Patient sensitive data Backups of your desktop or laptop computers.

7 How do I request a Vault account? Eligible researchers can request a Vault Collaborative Research Data Storage account to receive 50GB of storage space at no charge

8 How do I login to Vault? Most people use Vault via the Web interface. You can login to Vault at vault.northwestern.edu

9 When you first login to vault you will only see a public_html folder.

10 The public_html folder can be used as a Web page Other people can access your public_html folder by going to vault.northwestern.edu/netid/public_html If you have an index.html file in this folder you will see the following slide

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12 Uploading data into Vault The easiest way to move data into Vault is via the Web interface (A brief live demo of moving data into Vault will be given at this point)

13 You can also move data into Vault with the command line: sudo mount.davfs ' /vault [sudo] password for wmihalo: Please enter the username to authenticate with server or hit enter for none. Username: wem989 Please enter the password to authenticate user wem989 with server or hit enter for none. Password: Documents]$ cd /vault vault]$ cd wem989 wem989]$ cd public_html public_html]$ cat index.html Hello Vault World! pwd /vault/wem989/public_html

14 Using a command line interface with Vault can be complicated Linux and Windows can use CLIs to Vault. For Linux, the davfs2 package can be used. For Windows you can use netdrive. You can view the following reference for more information: /

15 Sharing data Tickets are the method used to allow access to a file or group of files. Tickets can be made with passwords. If you create a ticket without a password, it is regarded as a public ticket. A ticket is a URL (Uniform Resource Locator) that contains the information needed to download a file from Vault

16 Tickets: Tickets without passwords are public they are analogous to paper tickets that are distributed giving you access to a play at a theater Tickets with passwords are more private. You need the URL and the password to access a Vault file. They are analogous to obtaining a boarding pass and going through security at an airport so you can board a plane.

17 You can create a ticket and give it a time limitation The default for Vault is 30 days Once a ticket has reached its expiration date, the access to a file is no longer available for the person that has received the ticket If a ticket expires, you can still access all your data since you are the owner of the data

18 After creating a ticket you need to transmit the URL to a collaborator The easiest way to do this is to copy the URL into an message that you will send to a collaborator If you URLs via the Northwestern Collaboration Services, you have access to more distribution features such as mailing lists

19 Since a ticket is a URL you can use several methods to abbreviate it A typical ticket can look like this: t_373diwx8

20 Ever try giving the URL from the previous slide over the phone? It just won't work Fortunately you can abbreviate tickets; there are four common methods for doing this

21 Abbreviated tickets: (google) (bitly) (tinyurl)

22 And the final abbreviated ticket method Qrencode -o ticket.png using qrencode in a Linux system:

23 There are risks associated with abbreviated URLs and QR codes! It is trivial for somebody to create a malicious site on the Internet and distribute abbreviated URLs for access to the site; abbreviated URLs obscure the original information It is also trivial for somebody to create a QR (Quick Response) barcode and simply post it in a public place Only use abbreviated URLs and QR codes from somebody who you know personally

24 QR encoding software is available for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows systems Google qrencode for more information As always, be careful when downloading software from the Internet

25 Revoking Tickets If you set the availability time for a ticket, it will automatically become unavailable after that time has exceeded You can manually revoke a ticket before it has expired. Suppose you inadvertently created a ticket for a file and you realized later this was the wrong file. You can revoke the ticket by logging into Vault, selecting the file and going to Manage>Tickets>Delete.

26 Bugs. All software has bugs. Some known Vault issues include: Sharing information displayed within a directory may be incorrect. The only way to verify the accuracy of sharing for a file is to select the file and use Manage>Tickets to check the sharing. Vault does not work consistently with some browsers Firefox 10, for example Speed by default, file transfers can be slow

27 Help with Vault If something does not work correctly within Vault: Don't Panic! (We are paid to panic for you) Send an to this address is monitored constantly even on weekends