Remote Access ============= All users of our systems can access their files remotely; however, we currently do not provide general support to students or faculty for Samba and CIFS shares (i.e. mounting as a Windows drive) owing largely to security and usability considerations. (There is a legacy Samba setup; however, no support is provided.) There are a number of alternatives to Windows shares that we do support and consider effective for most needs. sshfs ----- If you are a Linux or Mac user, you can use the Secure Shell Filesystem client, which makes use of the Fuse project. Linux users can simply install the sshfs package (e.g., on Ubuntu: ``apt-get install sshfs``). The Dokan project on Windows provides the same capabilities as sshfs on Linux and the Mac. Secure FTP (sftp) ----------------- Most Secure Shell clients have the ability to upload/download files. If you are looking for something that is less transparent than a typical filesystem and can live with an upload/download model, this might be all you need (and seemingly, is what most of our users want). Version Control Systems ----------------------- We recommend that all of our students learn how to use the Concurrent Versioning System (CVS) or Subversion, especially for programming classes. Source code management is available through command-line tools or nicely integrated into many development environments, such as Eclipse and NetBeans (even Visual Studio supports Subversion through the AnkhSVN add-in). The TortoiseSVN and TortoiseHg clients for Windows are particularly nice! Gnome and KDE ------------- If you are an Ubuntu desktop user at home, both of these UIs allow you to connect to a remote place via SSH and browse folders as part of the UI's shell (that is, you don't need to go to the dreaded terminal). In Gnome, Places -> Connect to Server will allow a user to connect to a ssh server and will then treat that connection to your home directory like a mounted drive. PuTTY and Cygwin ---------------- Speaking of SSH access, Windows users are encouraged to use the PuTTY or Cygwin support for SSH. There are a number of good commercial solutions but these cost big money (between $75-$100) and are not likely to be cost effective (let alone necessary) for most members of our community. Unison ------ Unison is an excellent 2-way file synchronization tool. It supports all platforms.