Storage outside of M3

Summary of external storage options

With your M3 project, you have an allocation of storage on its high performance Lustre file system. This storage space is intended for data analyses and has a limited capacity. For large-scale, secure, and long-term research data storage, Monash University has the following offerings available through VicNode.

Name	Purpose	Learn more
Vault	Primarily used as archive, is a tape-based system specifically for long-term storage; this is best used to free up space on your M3 project, allowing for more data to be staged into your project for analyses.	See RDS - Vault Storage
Market	backed-up storage intended for active data sets and is accessible through the Windows, Linux, or Mac desktop environments at your research laboratory for convenient sharing of data files.	See RDS - Market Storage

Access Market and Vault shares on M3

Change to ~/.gvfs mount

If you used M3 prior to our Rocky 9 conversion in 2024, you may remember a directory at ~/.gvfs/. This is no longer generated for you! Instead, shares are mounted under /run/user/<USER_ID>/gvfs/, where <USER_ID> is your user ID (UID) on M3. You can find this UID by running the id -u command in a terminal on M3.

If you want to keep using ~/.gvfs, then make a symlink in your home directory that points to /run/user/ like so:

rm -rf `~/.gvfs`
ln -s /run/user/`id -u`/gvfs ~/.gvfs

The Market allocation is presented as an SMB share with a given name, usually of the form: RDS-R-<Faculty>-<Name>. This share can be mounted on M3, either in a Strudel desktop or on a DTN (Data Transfer Node).

1. If you are in a Strudel desktop, open a Terminal window within your Desktop session and move to step 2. Otherwise, connect to our DTN node:

ssh <username>@m3-dtn.massive.org.au

Once you have connected to the DTN, run

dbus-run-session bash

2. Once you have set up either your Desktop Terminal or your DTN access, you can mount your shares with the gio mount command.

gio mount smb://storage.erc.monash.edu.au/shares/<sharename>

Similarly, for shares on Vault2

gio mount smb://vault-v2.erc.monash.edu.au/<sharename>

• Replace the <sharename> with the one provided by your allocation;
• Enter your Monash ID (previously known as Authcate) username, when prompted;
• Enter MONASH when prompted to enter the "Domain"; and
• Finally, enter your Monash ID password on the "Password" prompt.

3. If successful, the mounted share will be visible through the file browser at /run/user/<USER_ID>/gvfs/, where <USER_ID> is your user ID (UID) on M3. You can find this UID by running the id -u command in a terminal on M3. See our tip above for making this appear at ~/.gvfs instead.

4. It is best to cleanly unmount the share when it is no longer needed, by using this command:

# For Market
gio mount -u smb://storage.erc.monash.edu.au/shares/<sharename>
# For Vault2
gio mount -u smb://vault-v2.erc.monash.edu.au/<sharename>

However, the share should be automatically unmounted once the desktop session terminates, or you exit your DTN terminal.

The collection owner should be able to add and/or remove collaborators who can mount the share through the eSolutions Group Management page: https://groupadmin.monash.edu/. On this page, a list of shares that you have admin privileges for will appear, each of this shares will appear as: RDS-R-<Faculty>-<Name>-Shared.

Important note

We are unable to add non-Monash users to mount a share, since authentication is done against the Monash AD.

Troubleshooting

NT_STATUS_ACCESS_DENIED

If you get an error like:

tree connect failed: NT_STATUS_ACCESS_DENIED

you probably do not have the correct permissions for the share you are trying to access.

Transport endpoint is not connected

If you see the error Transport endpoint is not connected when trying to interact with your mount on a particular node, then:

1. Run ps aux | grep $USER and look for any gvfs or dbus processes.
2. If you see any such processes, try gently terminating them with

kill -SIGINT `pgrep -u $USER 'gvfs|dbus'`

3. Rerun ps aux | grep $USER. If you still any gvfs or dbus processes, then forcefully terminate the processes with

kill -9 `pgrep -u $USER 'gvfs|dbus'`

4. Run ls -la /run/user/id -u $USER. If you see lots of question marks ? for the gvfs row, then unmount it with

fusermount -u /run/user/`id -u`/gvfs

Now go back through the instructions to mount your Market/Vault share. If issues persist, please contact our help desk.

Access Vault on M3 with SFTP or rsync

The Vault-V2 has allowed MeRC to extend the protocols available to Vault users. Vault comprises a disk cache frontend and a tape library backend. This is not suited to millions of little files, but is highly effective with tar, zip and squashFS archives.

SFTP and rsync access is available on a request basis. SSH keys can be used.

Users with SSH access to Linux hosts such as M3 DTN can use the command line interactively to launch SFTP or rsync applications and use scripts to archive, locate and recall large quantities of data. These methods have slightly different syntax depending on the OS version of Linux.

There are issues around the use of the backslash character as part of the MONASH domain declaration. The backslash is also used as a text escape character. There are examples below that use one, two and even three backslash characters in a row to get the desired folder/file path interpreted properly.

SFTP Access

tip

Before you run any sftp commands, load our sftp module:

module load sftp/2022-12-16-debian

This avoids weird behaviour with relative filepaths (see example below), where a file is not found due to the default sftp handling backslashes poorly.

Connected to vault-v2.erc.monash.edu.
sftp> ls
some-share
sftp> ls some-share
Can't ls: "/home/MONASH\\my-username/some-share" not found
# Instead you would need to use absolute filepaths with 3 backslashes every time!
sftp> ls /home/MONASH\\\my-username/some-share
/home/MONASH\my-username/some-share/sub-dir1
/home/MONASH\my-username/some-share/sub-dir2

Our module handles such relative paths:

[lexg@m3-login3 ~]$ module load sftp/2022-12-16-debian
[lexg@m3-login3 ~]$ sftp MONASH\\my-username@vault-v2.erc.monash.edu
Connected to vault-v2.erc.monash.edu.
sftp> ls
some-share    
sftp> ls some-share/  # this command threw the unexpected error previously
some-share/sub-dir1     some-share/sub-dir2

tip

Requires two backslashes.

sftp MONASH\\<MonashID>@vault-v2.erc.monash.edu

SFTP to upload data to Vault from M3 login or dtn node

tip

Requires two backslashes.

If you are already in the correct working directory, you can simply upload the file

sftp> put <local-files>

Or you can specify the destination:

sftp> put <local-files>  /home/MONASH\\<MonashID>/<share>/vault/<path>/

SFTP to retrieve the data from Vault on M3 login or dtn node

tip

Requires three backslashes.

sftp> get /home/MONASH\\\<MonashID>/<sharename>/vault/<path>/

rsync

You can also use rsync to archive a copy of your data to Vault.

tip

Requires two backslashes.

rsync -aHWv --stats --progress /<local-folder-path>/ MONASH\\<MonashID>@vault-v2.erc.monash.edu:<sharename>/vault/<path>

To retrieve your files back from Vault with rsync:

rsync -aHWv --stats --progress MONASH\\<MonashID>@vault-v2.erc.monash.edu:<sharename>/vault/<path> /<local-folder-path>/ -->