Purdue University

Can you remove me from the Fortress mailing list?

Your subscription in the Fortress mailing list is tied to your account on Fortress. If you are no longer using your account on Fortress, your account can be deleted from the My Accounts page. Hover over the resource you wish to remove yourself from and click the red 'X' button. Your account and mailing list subscription will be removed overnight. Be sure to make a copy of any data you wish to keep first.

Do I need to do anything to my firewall to access Fortress?

Yes, any machines using HSI or HTAR must have all firewalls (local and departmental) configured to allow open access from the following IP addresses:

128.211.138.154
128.211.138.155
128.211.138.156
128.211.138.157
128.211.138.158
128.211.138.159
128.211.138.160
128.211.138.161
128.211.138.162
128.211.138.163

Firewall issues may manifest with error messages like "put: Error -50 on transfer." If you are unsure of how to modify your firewall settings, please consult with your department's IT support or the documentation for your operating system. Access to Fortress is restricted to on-campus networks. If you need to directly access Fortress from off-campus, please use the Purdue VPN service before connecting.

Note: The list of IP addresses changes occasionally as machines are added or retired.  The list above is current, so if you have other IP addresses in your firewall, they can be safely removed.  In particular, any IPs in the range 128.211.138.40-128.211.138.48 can be removed.

Can I download HSI or HTAR binaries for my OS platform?

Yes, visit the Downloads page to download HSI or HTAR packages for your operating system.

Note: If your username on your desktop does not match your career account username, HSI and HTAR require configuration to connect using your career account username:

• For HSI, use the -l careeraccount option on the hsi command line.
• For HTAR, set the HPSS_PRINCIPAL environment variable to your career account username:
  bash: export HPSS_PRINCIPAL=careeraccount
  csh/tcsh: setenv HPSS_PRINCIPAL=careeraccount
  

Can I set up a shared space for my research group to share data?

Research groups are assigned a group data storage space within Fortress with each Data Depot group space. Faculty should request a Data Depot trial to create a shared Fortress space for their research group.

RCAC resources are not intended to store data protected by Federal privacy and security laws (e.g., HIPAA, ITAR, classified, etc.). It is the responsibility of the faculty partner to ensure that no protected data is stored on the systems.

Please keep in mind that such spaces are, by design, accessible by others and should not be used to store private information such as grades, login credentials, or personal data. Contact us to create a group space for your group.

What limitations does Fortress have?

Fortress has a few limitations that you should keep in mind:

• Fortress does not support direct FTP or SCP transfers. SFTP connections are supported.
• Fortress does not support Unicode filenames. All filenames must contain only ASCII characters.
• Fortress does not support sparse files.
• Fortress is a tape archive. While it can handle use case of "multitude of small files", performance may be severely decreased (compared to a much preferred case of "fewer files of much larger size"). If you need to store a large number of small files, we strongly recommend that you bundle them up first (with zip, tar, htar, etc) before placing resulting archive into Fortress. Note: a "small file" on Fortress scale is typically considered something under 30-50MB per file.
• HTAR has an individual file size limit of 64GB. If any files you are trying to archive with HTAR are greater than 64GB, then HTAR will immediately fail. This does not limit the number of files in the archive or the total overall size of the archive. To get around this limitation, try using the htar_large command. It is slower than using HTAR but it will work around the 64GB file size limit.