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Mounting Fabian storage on your computer using rclone

Before you begin ensure you can ssh to Fabian using ssh fab. For help with that follow the guide Logging in via SSH and transferring data via SCP/SFTP/rsync

As an administrator on your windows device set the ssh-agent service to start automatically and start the ssh-agent service with the following commands in a powershell console


Get-Service ssh-agent | Set-Service -StartupType Automatic
Start-Service ssh-agent

Then add your ssh key ssh-add .ssh\id_ed25519

Install rclone

Download rclone from https://rclone.org/downloads/ and unzip the archive.

It is a executable file that can be run from any location

Configure rclone

Locate rclone's config file with the command .\rclone config file

You should see something like

Configuration file is stored at:
C:\Users\U.Username\AppData\Roaming\rclone\rclone.conf

Open that file with your favourite text editor and add a section for fab.

Replace your LSE username here with your LSE username, that is the one you see when you login to fabian and NOT your local username or email address.

Ensure the file is named exactly rclone.conf (not .txt).

[fab]
type = sftp
host = jump.fab.lse.ac.uk
user = your LSE username here
port = 22619
shell_type = unix

Test the connection rclone lsd fab:

If successful, you’ll see directories from your Fabian home.

Mounting storage

Install the winfsp program from https://github.com/winfsp/winfsp/releases

As this requires administrator rights on your device users with LSE owned devices will need to wait for this to be available from the App Store, it has been requested.

You can mount your storage with the command rclone mount fab: \\fab\home you should now see a network drive in your windows file explorer

If you want to mount the storage from another part of Fabian, say a project you are a member of then add that path

rclone mount fab:/projects/my_department/projectname \\fab\projectname