We have described in a number of Blog posts some features and benefits of using the the
Globus File Transfer service. Now that UM is a Globus Provider you have a new feature available to you, sharing of directories and files with your collaborators who are Globus users as well.
There are two avenues of sharing possible for you now. The first is via standard server endpoints that have sharing enabled and another via "Globus Connect Personal" client endpoints. Today I will describe sharing for standard servers endpoints only. Sharing for Personal Connect endpoints is a bit more complicated due to differences between OS versions of the client and will be described later.
To see if the endpoint you use has sharing enabled navigate to the endpoint in "Manage Endpoints" within the Globus web interface. Click on the Sharing tab, note that you may have to Activate (login) a session on the endpoint first. If sharing is enabled you will be told so and will see a "Add Shared Endpoint" button in the panel. Shared endpoints are essentially sub-endpoints you can create and provide access to any other Globus user.
Lets go ahead and make a shared endpoint from umich#flux by clicking on the button. You are presented a web form to provide required information:
Host Path ~/Test_share
You can either give a complete absolute path or use unix shorthand (~/) for my home directory as I have done (make sure the shared directory exists first!).
New Endpoint Name traeker#Test_share
Description Tell others know what this is about.
Clicking on the "Create and Manage permissions" button creates the shared endpoint and presents you with a new panel to manage permissions. It shows you the current access setting and clicking on the "Add Permission" button presents you with a number of options of how to share this endpoint with other Globus users.
Share With check which one to use among email, user, group, all users
Permissions check one or both of read, write
A couple of things you to keep in mind as you set these parameters:
- Be careful about choosing all users as this will allow all users logged into Globus to access this share.
- By default only read permission is set. If you allow write permission you could get files containing viruses and also get yourself into trouble with any disk usage quotas.
One easy way to manage permissions to a large group of people is to create a Globus group and populate it with users. Be advised that the entire group will have the same permissions so if you need some users to have different permissions, you either create a different group or add each user to the share individually. Using groups comes in handy when you have multiple shared directories to similar sets of collaborators.
Once a directory is shared with another Globus user he/she can find that endpoint name via the "shared with me" filter on the top of the endpoint list panel. With name in hand they can now transfer files from/to that endpoint by typing in the name under the "Transfer Files" screen just like another other endpoint they have access to.
You can go back to this shared endpoint to add new or edit any access settings.
Globus endpoint sharing is very powerful as it gives non-UM collaborators access to your research data without having to create a UM "Sponsored account" for them to access your systems. This is very similar to other cloud file sharing services like Box and Dropbox. The big difference is that Globus does not store the data and thus quotas are managed by your systems policies.
