Capability to access a SFTP drive from within Igor Pro

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At the moment I am trying to access some files stored on my lab computer, from another computer at home.

My analysis routine needs to go over the thousands of igor binary files one by one, so one way is to use Window's SMB and map the network drive, which after Igor can access the file like they are on a local drive.

However, SMB not only being slow, but it is also difficult to setup/often blocked by ISPs which makes it not very reliable. 
Sorry if I missed and the function exists, is it possible to make Igor connect to a SFTP server and access files on across the internet on the fly?

I'm not sure if `URLopen` can do this on IP8, but the easyHttp XOP can do SFTP operations.

March 20, 2019 at 02:08 pm - Permalink

URLRequest doesn't do sftp.

You might take a look at https://serverfault.com/questions/6919/is-there-an-open-source-tool-to-…. There, a few different utilities are mentioned that (claim to?) allow you to map a local "drive" to a remote sftp location.

You might also be able to set up a tunnel using ssh and then use the regular FTP* operations to make an FTP connection to your local machine on a specified port, which is mapped to a remote location. See https://serverfault.com/questions/6919/is-there-an-open-source-tool-to-… for example.

You could also try using a VPN connection if your ISP is blocking SMB. That's not necessarily simplifying things, but VPN can often avoid a lot of crappy ISP configuration issues.

March 20, 2019 at 09:17 pm - Permalink

Thanks for the help, I have totally no idea Igor has FTP connectivity within it. It will be very helpful. I will look into setting up a VPN.

March 21, 2019 at 07:06 am - Permalink

The effort you engage in to access the network through Igor Pro may only be worth it when you have to do it routinely from now until forever. For a one-shot deal (I am at home this week and really need to get to those files off-site now), I'd consider a different approach.

Before you start, create a local drive and upload the desired files. Access them locally to the Igor Pro experiment. When you save the experiment, you have saved the files that you needed (as waves). Voila! Your work is done. Delete the local drive.

 

March 21, 2019 at 12:40 pm - Permalink

@Sandbo is the S in SFTP a hard requirement? If yes I would give easyHTTP XOP a shot, if not the builtin procedures I've posted above.

March 22, 2019 at 03:50 am - Permalink

Actually you just reminded me I don't exactly need "S", and I could just host a FTP server and add that as a local drive on the remote Windows system.

But for data security, at the end I did it the old way. I pull my old PC router out, host a OpenVPN server at home, and connect the office Windows to that OpenVPN server. Now with the connection, the home server and office computer are on the same virtual network and I can add them as local drive without any modification to my code.

March 24, 2019 at 03:21 pm - Permalink