How do I transfer files to a SEAS account?

There are several ways to transfer files to and from a SEAS account:

Local Machine

If you are sitting at a CETS-managed workstation or lab computer and have logged in using your SEAS account, your home directory has already been mounted. Simply use the file manager of your preference to copy files. Any files copied into your home directory will appear on any other SEAS system that mounts it, including eniac.seas.upenn.edu. Since you have physical access to the machine, you can also use a USB drive or other supported removable storage options.

Remote Machine

If you are using a machine that is not managed by CETS, you will probably need to rely on a protocol that allows you to remotely transfer files, such as SMB/CIFS or SSH-based methods like SFTP, SSHFS, scp or rsync.

Two-Step Verification is required when using a PennKey password for SSH authentication on SEAS systems. See What is SSH? for more information.

Penn VPN software is required for all SSH connections from networks that are outside of PennNet.

Before connecting to a machine on PennNet via SSH from an external network, you must install and run the University Client VPN software:

Windows

WS_FTP is the SFTP client recommended by ISC for Microsoft Windows. It provides a graphical user interface to transfer files between your local machine and any machine running an SFTP server. It can be configured to remember a list of sites to which you frequently connect.

Alternative graphical SFTP/SCP clients include MobaXterm, FileZilla, WinSCP or the command line utilities included with Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). The popular PuTTY SSH client includes the psftp and pscp command line utilities.

MacOS

MacOS includes the SSH-based scp, sftp and rsync command line file transfer utilities (with Kerberos support). Simply open a terminal to use them.

Fetch is the graphical SFTP client recommended by ISC for MacOS.

Linux

Most Linux distributions include the SSH-based scp, sftp and rsync command line file transfer utilities (often with Kerberos support). Simply open a terminal to use them.

There are many graphical file transfer utilities available for Linux, and many desktop environments include file managers that can directly use a variety of protocols to connect to remote accounts.

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