Accessing big files from your homepage

Your personal webpage is setup under ~/public_html. Files or directories above this folder will be accessible to everyone unless you setup any type of authentication. If you wish to have a file or a collection of files that is to big to fit within your quota limits (or that will consume a great part of your allowed disk space) you can do the following:

  1. The only disk space you are able to use outside your home directory is either a scratch or a data space in one of the public or your group machines. If you have never used a particular scratch/data space you will need to do your initial setup: a) choose a machine that you can ssh to (say unidir for the rest of this example); b) on your local machine, open a terminal and type cd /scratch/machinename/public or cd/data/machinename/public (i.e., cd /scratch/unidir/public). Most of the damtp machines have a scratch space setup (it is setup as a logical volume on the same disk as the system) but few have a data space (that is by definition setup in a separate disk from the disk that contains the system). You will need to create a folder where you keep can your data. For consistency you should choose your crsid for the name of that base folder (you can have subfolders above that if you wish). If you don't know what is your crsid, then you can use your login username (that for most people should be the same as their crsid, typing whoami should give you that info). Let us say that your crsid is ftw26, then you would type mkdir ftw26 to create that folder.
  2. You can now copy any content you wish (space constrained though) to that folder. Let us suppose that you have then copied your bigfile.zip to /scratch/unidir/public/
  3. Now that you have stored your file in an accessible location, you can cd ~/public_html and then create a symbolic link to the file you have just copied accross: ln -s /scratch/unidir/public/ftw26/bigfile.zip (replace accordantly). Your file would then be www accessible by going to www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/ftw26/bigfile.zip (replace accordantly).