Distributing data sets from NFS

Many CSAIL researchers have large collections of data stored in NFS. Sometimes it’s desirable to publish some or a part of these data sets on the Web, either to the general public or to a limited set of users. This can be done by means of the data.csail.mit.edu Web server, which is the only supported Web server that has access to CSAIL NFS.

Features

• Supports both plain HTTP and HTTPS
• Can serve any file from NFS so long as it is readable by the server
• Runs nginx, a modern, high-performance Web server, with a load-balancing proxy (also nginx) in front
  • This means that .htaccess files are not supported
• Custom host names and redirects will not be supported

How to use

There is no default mapping from NFS space to the data server in the way that there is for AFS and the “regular” Web servers. Instead, each NFS directory you wish to publish will be assigned a separate URL on the data server, which will be of the form http[s]://data.csail.mit.edu/somename/. To request a mapping, send in a help ticket and include:

1. The full path of the directory you want to publish in CSAIL NFS space
2. The short name you want it published under somename in the example above)
3. Whether you want to use time-limited links