Mounting /project space on a VM in the cloud

Introduction

This document describes how to let a virtual machine (VM) access /project filesystems on the national systems. VMs hosted on the Compute Canada cloud do not have direct access to the filesystems on the national HPC clusters (Graham, Béluga, Cedar, and Niagara). In order to access files stored on /project from a VM, please use SSHFS and observe the requirements mentioned below.

SSHFS

SSHFS enables mounting your /project folder inside your VM. SSHFS mounts appear like regular folders in your VM and can be accessed via regular Linux commands.

A reference can be found at https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/SSHFS

Requirements

In order to avoid security issues, the following requirements are needed if you choose to mount /project inside your VM:

• Do not store your password in plain text on the VM.
• Create an SSH key specifically for use with SSHFS, and only use it for that. Do not use the same SSH key that you use for logging in.
• Keep your VM up to date and only open ports that are required and secured.