Sharing data with the host

In order to share files between the VM and your host machine, you can mount a subdirectory from the host on /home/irafuser/vm_transfer, using sshfs.

For example, if your username is gumby and you wish to copy files to/from /home/gumby/data, you can log onto the VM as irafuser and issue the following command:

sshfs gumby@vmhost:data/ ~/vm_transfer/

where vmhost is a literal alias for your host machine. Any path after the colon that doesn’t begin with a / is relative to your home directory. Remember you’re entering the password for gumby, not irafuser.

To umount the shared directory again (so you can mount a different one), type fusermount -u ~/vm_transfer.

Note

The vm_transfer directory is intended for sharing input & output files, not for processing data in. It’s suggested that you keep raw input files there and set the rawpath parameter of the relevant Gemini IRAF tasks to point to vm_transfer from your working directory. Then when your data reduction is complete, you can copy the final results back there.

When using GemVM rather than VirtualBox, you can work directly in vm_transfer if you really want to, but data processing will take roughly 3-4x as long (and is already slow when emulating Intel Linux on M1). You can fit about 40GB of data on the VM itself, as long as your host machine has that much space available for the expanded disk image.

Note

If you wish to mount shared directories without having to enter a password, you may create an ssh key pair on the VM and install the public key (eg.~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub) on your host machine. We cannot do that for you without compromising your security, but a Web search (eg. for “linux ssh key pair login”) will turn up many tutorials explaining what to do. Make sure that the disk image (qcow2 file) on your host machine is not readable by other users, since it can now be used to gain access to your host machine!