local hosting
Rodney, Kim
To whom it may concern,
I am one of the System Administrators for the West Virginia University Health Sciences Center.
We have a request from a faculty member to host a public, anonymous web or FTP site that would be shared with this genome project.
Naturally, we have some questions on the data and why it requires full open, unprotected access and would like to speak with someone at your location for further details.
Does your software require complete and open access via HTTP or FTP in order to grab data? We don’t get requests to share data over the Internet so openly without at least a username and password but are being told that is how it works.
So could we please have a contact who we could speak with and clear up what we can do to help our faculty member and provide them with the proper solution?
Thank you.
Jonathan Casper
Hello Kim,
Thank you for your question about the access requirements for displaying your data on the UCSC Genome Browser. Our software does not require completely open access to your data files via FTP or HTTP; we also support HTTPS connections. To set up files for remote access as a custom track or track hub, the faculty member would have to include the HTTPS credentials needed to access the files. The format for this kind of of URL is described at http://genome.ucsc.edu/goldenPath/help/customTrack.html#share. Does that address your needs? We are also able to supply you with the IP addresses of the machines that would be making requests, if that helps. The server hosting the files would also need to be able to support range requests, as we use those to download only the regions of the data files that are actively being viewed.
Beyond that, the UCSC Genome Browser is designed primarily as a research tool - not designed or intended to provide intense data security as would be required for clinical data. We created the Genome Browser in a Box (GBiB) to help address those situations. GBiB is a small server in a virtual machine that provides our Genome Browser interface, making remote queries to our public MySQL and download servers for the data it displays. More information on GBiB is available at http://genome.ucsc.edu/goldenPath/help/gbib.html.
Please let us know if we can help you further. If you have any more questions, please reply to gen...@soe.ucsc.edu or genome...@soe.ucsc.edu. Questions sent to those addresses will be archived in publicly-accessible forums for the benefit of other users. If your question contains sensitive data, you may send it instead to genom...@soe.ucsc.edu.
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Jonathan Casper
UCSC Genome Bioinformatics Group
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Rodney, Kim
That does help some. Our faculty member believed this cannot work if there were a username and password but there are policies that state we do not give access without one.
The problem with our accounts are they are forced to have passwords changed frequently. Maybe I could have this one designated as a resource account to prevent that from happening or the password could change up to every 90 days and the URL would have to be reconstructed each time to keep it working.
We’re trying to figure out how to help our faculty member do this without violating the policies we’re supposed to enforce.
Since the username/password requirement isn’t an issue, it’s keeping the password from the required change that might be the last obstacle.
Have you ever used SFTP and certificates for authentication? We had to do that for another project so that the password change wasn’t as big of a factor.
Thank you for getting back in touch with me, Jonathan. We’ll read up on this and fi we have other questions that we don’t find answers for on your site, I’ll get back in touch.
Matthew Speir
Unfortunately, we do not support SFTP connections for custom tracks or track hubs.
I hope this is helpful. If you have any further questions, please reply to gen...@soe.ucsc.edu. All messages sent to that address are archived on a publicly-accessible Google Groups forum. If your question includes sensitive data, you may send it instead to genom...@soe.ucsc.edu.
Matthew Speir
UCSC Genome Bioinformatics Group
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Rodney, Kim
One more question. Have you folks worked with OneDrive before? While our production OneDrive does not allow anonymous access, read/write access can be granted to any Microsoft Live account. Using that account, it would be maintained outside of the University IDs and not bound by the 90 day password changes.
I do not know if it support range requests though.
Steve Heitner
Hello, Kim.
We do not specifically have experience with OneDrive. In the past, we have had users host data on similar public data storage services like DropBox and while it worked initially, internal changes at DropBox caused user data to no longer be accessible via the Genome Browser. While something like this may currently suit your needs, I don’t know that we can recommend any specific external service as a suitable long-term solution.
Please contact us again at gen...@soe.ucsc.edu if you have any further questions. Questions sent to that address will be archived in a publicly-accessible forum for the benefit of other users. If your question contains sensitive data, you may send it instead to genom...@soe.ucsc.edu.
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Steve Heitner
UCSC Genome Bioinformatics Group
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Rodney, Kim
We are beginning to setup a server for our faculty member who want’s to participate with your project.
What IP is the server that will collect from our FTP or HTTP server? We will lock it down to only allowing that IP to the server.
From: Jonathan Casper [mailto:jca...@soe.ucsc.edu]
Sent: Thursday, February 19, 2015 1:29 PM
To: Rodney, Kim
Cc: gen...@soe.ucsc.edu; Nesselrodt, Jacqueline
Subject: Re: [genome] local hosting
Hello Kim,
Nichols, Richard
Could somebody from your team contact me…
I am configuring our FTP server to accept connections from you and I’d like to talk with somebody on your end about some technical questions about how you will be initiating the connection..
A phone call would probably make this simplest.. Please call me at your convenience at 304-293-1032 or on my cell at 304-813-2405
Thank you,
Ricky Nichols
Senior Network Engineer
West Virginia University
Health Sciences Center
From: Rodney, Kim
Sent: Wednesday, March 11, 2015 10:52 AM
To: Nichols, Richard
Subject: FW: [genome] local hosting
From:
Luvina Guruvadoo
Sent: 3/9/2015 1:41 PM
To: Rodney, Kim
Cc: Nesselrodt, Jacqueline
Subject:
Re: [genome] local hosting
Hello Kim,
Here are our server IPs:
host genome.ucsc.edu
genome.ucsc.edu is an alias for
genome.cse.ucsc.edu.
genome.cse.ucsc.edu has address 128.114.119.136
genome.cse.ucsc.edu has address 128.114.119.131
genome.cse.ucsc.edu has address 128.114.119.132
genome.cse.ucsc.edu has address 128.114.119.133
genome.cse.ucsc.edu has address 128.114.119.134
genome.cse.ucsc.edu has address 128.114.119.135
If you have any further questions, please reply to
gen...@soe.ucsc.edu. All messages sent to that address are archived on a publicly-accessible forum. If your question includes sensitive data, you may send it instead to
genom...@soe.ucsc.edu.
- - -
Luvina Guruvadoo
UCSC Genome Bioinformatics Group
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