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Help:Access to Toolforge instances with PuTTY and WinSCP

This page documents Single-click solutions for accessing your Toolforge instances using PuTTY and WinSCP. For other Cloud VPS project than Tools, instructions differ.

With the correct settings, a single click shell connection or file transfer is possible, and no command line input trouble is needed.

Contents

Prerequisites

Information:

  • USERNAME: your username on wikitech and Toolforge
  • PATH-TO-YOUR-PRIVATE-KEY: the path and name of your private key file on your local system

Programs:

  • PuTTY
  • WinSCP
  • plink.exe (part of PuTTY suite)
  • Pageant (PuTTY authentication agent, part of both the PuTTY and WinSCP suites)

How to set up PuTTY for direct access to your Toolforge account

You are likely going to set up connections to each of the login servers:

   

The remaining configuration options are identical for all login servers. Of course, you may prefer screen and scroll buffer sizes of your choice:

   

Adding a keep-alive time will prevent your connection from dropping when inactive.

     

How to set up WinSCP for direct access to your Toolforge account

With WinSCP you must setup a site pointing to the adequate hostname and change the advanced settings to use your private key file on the authentication tab.

 

 
Your project is located in the folder:
/mnt/nfs/labstore-secondary-tools-project/PROJECT-NAME
 
Switch to the tool account by giving the protocol option:
sudo -u tools.PROJECT-NAME /usr/lib/sftp-server
 
Enter the path to your private key

Troubleshooting permissions errors

Sometimes the file system permissions on the tool's directory (/data/project/$TOOL) can get messed up and be missing the group write permission. You can check the current permissions by logging into a bastion and showing the directory:

$ ssh tools-login.wmflabs.org
$ ls -ld /data/project/bd808-test
drwxrwsr-x 7 tools.bd808-test tools.bd808-test 4096 Jul 19 15:07 /data/project/bd808-test/

The "drwxrwsr-x" section in the output above is the directory permissions. Each letter tells you something about the permissions mask on the file system:

  • "d" - this is a directory.
  • "rwx" - These are the permissions for the directory's owning user. "r" - read, "w" - write, "x" - eXecute.
  • "rws" - These are the permissions for the directory's owning group. "r" - read, "w" - write, "s" - sticky. Sticky implies execute and also attempts to set the same group ownership on all new files and directories created inside the directory.
  • "r-x" - These are the permissions for "other" users (users who are not the owner or in the owning group). The "-" means that other users cannot write to this directory.

Your user should be a member of the owning group for the directory. When you cannot upload files the problem is often that the "w" write permission is missing for the group on either the tool's directory itself or on a subdirectory or file that you are trying to change. Fixing that is as easy as logging into a bastion, becoming the tool, and changing the permissions:

$ ssh tools-login.wmflabs.org
$ become $MY_TOOL
$ chmod -R g+w /data/project/$MY_TOOL
# Recusively grant write permission to the group on all files and directories.

References

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