[LUGSB] Using Nautilus on campus

[Michael F. Lamb]

Hi all,

I'm sure most of you already know this, it's pretty trivial if you've 
been a unix geek forever but maybe it will be useful for someone new to 
Linux or to the SB campus. For your consideration:

The gnome file manager "nautilus" has a really cool feature that allows 
it to show you ssh or samba connections as plain old file systems. This 
can come in really handy on campus. Lets you drag-and-drop files from 
your machine to your SB drive (for quick printing turnaround time in the 
SINC sites) or from your second linux box to any random other computer. 
Basically if you can use 'ssh' to access a computer, or a mac can access 
it with "connect to server... smb://," then there's a good chance 
nautilus will let you see the files on it in a nice drag-and-drop way.

A MacOS machine can do something similar to connect to a samba share (as 
described in http://ic.sunysb.edu/helpdesk/sbmac.shtml) but I don't 
think they have native access to any machine running ssh like we do. 
(Heh heh heh!)

This feature of nautilus used to be a bit flaky and crashy, but I've 
been using it a lot lately with good results, so I'll describe it here.

Starting Nautilus
-----------------

If you're a Gnome user, you can just open up your "Blah's home" or 
"Computer" on your desktop somewhere, maybe there's a "File Manager" 
option in the menus. If you're a command line guy like me, the best way 
to launch nautilus is: "nautilus --no-desktop --browser" so it doesn't 
try to take over your desktop with all its Gnomey stuff.

Connecting to various services
------------------------------

Now, tell it "go to location." That's Go->Location in the menus, or 
"Control-L." It will ask for an address, and here are some of the ones I 
  know and use on the SB campus.

(In these addresses, you must replace <ip> with an IP Address or <netid> 
with your SB netid. Figuring those out is left as an exercise left for 
the reader.)

SB Drive (="My Documents" on all the SINC site machines):
smb://SUNYSB.EDU;<netid>@MyFiles.campus.stonybrook.edu/~<netid>

Sparky: (where us old timers kept our files before SB Drive)
First, find out your home directory. ssh to sparky and type 'pwd'. That 
will give you something like "/export/home2/b/l/blah" Stick that in 
<home> below:
ssh://<netid>@sparky.ic.sunysb.edu/<home>

UG lab: (computer science majors)
For this one, do the same trick as on sparky to determine the location 
of your home directory. It probably looks something like "/home/g/blah"
Also, the username for the ug lab isn't necessarily the same as your 
NetID. So call that <uglabid>.
ssh://<uglabid>@ug.cs.sunysb.edu/<home>

Your other computer in your dorm room, running linux and ssh:
First, find out its IP address, <ip>. If your username over there is 
different, use <user>. (If you've connected to it before with ssh you 
already know how to do this.)
ssh://<user>@<ip>/

If you have a machine off-campus that you ssh to, a web server or a 
computer at home on a broadband connection, you can use nautilus to 
access that, too. Assuming you already can access it via ssh.

Bookmark it!
------------

Those long URLs are pretty annoying, and that's where another nice 
feature of nautilus comes in: You can bookmark a place once you're 
there, then it sits there in your sidebar. Makes getting around campus 
remotely really easy, and reduces your time in those crowded SINC sites.

Other applications
------------------

The thing that enables this is called "Gnome VFS." Any of the apps on 
your linux machine that know how to use Gnome VFS can treat an SSH or an 
SMB connection as a filesystem with nothing special going on with root 
or kernel modules or mounting.

This means that you can, in theory, without much effort, use Totem on 
your not-much-disk-space linux laptop on a wireless connection on campus 
somewhere to listen to music streaming over a secure connection to the 
monstrous Linux box in your dorm room.

I don't know of very many other operating systems that can do that 
out-of-the-box ;)