Playbook transferuser

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Summary

Allows users to transfer data between a remote host and the workspace using SSH (secure shell). This component sets up a special user with its own SSH keys to facilitate the transfer. This is useful in cases where the user does not need or seeks to avoid to store her own private key on the remote host.

Suitability: sensitive data.

Requires

• Unix OS
• sudo enabled for users who use the transfer command

Description

• On the SURF Research Cloud workspace, users can execute the command transfer on to install a public key for the transfer user. The script will ask the user to input an SSH public key. This should be public key corresponding to a private key on the machine that the user wants to login to the workspace from (let’s call this machine: “the remote host”). If no keypair exists on the remote host, it can be generated e.g. with ssh-keygen.
• After this preparation step, the user can initiate ssh type commands such as scp on a remote host to transfer files to the workspace. For instance:

scp myfile.txt transfer@<workspace_ip>:~/mycopiedfile.txt
# transfers the file `myfile.txt` on the machine where `scp` is executed to `/home/transfer/mycopiedfile.txt` on the workspace where the `transfer on` command was run.

• When all file transfers are done, users should execute command transfer off to disable further use of the keypair based access.

Variables

It is possible to customize/override the name of the Linux user “transfer” and the commandline script “transfer”. See the transferuser role for details.

See also

Role transferuser

History

2023 Written by Ton Smeele (Utrecht University)

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