NU no longer has an active arrangement with Box.com and has migrated to Microsoft 365 services. Please visit our page on using rclone for file transfer or using OneDrive with Globus (UNL only) for instructions on how to access your NU Microsoft 365 storage from HCC resources.
The instructions below remain as a reference for use with personal or other institutional Box accounts.
Login to your institution or personal Box account.
Since we are going to be using ftps protocol to access your Box.com storage, you need to create an External Password. In the Box.com interface, you can create it at Account Settings > Account > Authentication > Create Password.
After logging into the cluster of your choice, load the lftp
module by entering the command below at the prompt:
module load lftp
Connect to Box using your full email as the username and external password you created:
lftp -u <username> ftps://ftp.box.com
Password: <password>
Be sure to use your fully qualified username; that is, include the domain. For example, hhusker2@example.edu
.
Test the connection by running the ls
command. You should see a listing of your Box files. Assuming it works, add a bookmark named “box” to use when connecting later. Optionally run set bmk:save-passwords yes
first if you want lftp to remember the password:
lftp demo2@example.edu@ftp.box.com:/> set bmk:save-passwords yes
lftp demo2@example.edu@ftp.box.com:/> bookmark add box
Exit lftp
by typing quit
. To reconnect later, use bookmark name:
lftp box
To upload or download files, use get
and put
commands. For example:
[demo2@login.swan ~]$ lftp box
lftp demo2@example.edu@ftp.box.com:/> put myfile.txt
lftp demo2@example.edu@ftp.box.com:/> get my_other_file.txt
To download directories, use the mirror
command. To upload directories, use the mirror
command with the -R
option. For example, to download a directory named my_box-dir
to your current directory:
[demo2@login.swan ~]$ lftp box
lftp demo2@example.edu@ftp.box.com:/> mirror my_box_dir
my_hcc_dir
to Box, use mirror
with the -R
option:
[demo2@login.swan ~]$ lftp box
lftp demo2@example.edu@ftp.box.com:/> mirror -R my_hcc_dir
Lftp also supports using scripts to transfer files. This can be used to automatically download or upload files during jobs. For example, create a file called “transfer.sh” with the following lines:
open box
get some_input_file.tar.gz
put my_output_file.tar.gz
module load lftp
lftp -f transfer.sh