Summer 2025 Academic Home Directory Change FAQ

This FAQ was last updated 3/5/2025.

This change impacts classes that utilize the McKelvey Linuxlab Cluster. If this resource is not leveraged as part of your instruction, your students in your classes may not be affected.

All references to $WUSTLKEY in this FAQ, primarily in directory paths, is a reference to your own WUSTL Key login name.

What is being changed?

Beginning for the fall semester of 2025, all users that log into either the academic LinuxLab cluster or the research ENGR Compute Cluster will see the same home directory in either resource.

For those familiar with the Linux Lab, this means that home directories on shell.engr.wustl.edu, shell2.engr.wustl.edu, and seen via sessions at https://linuxlab.engr.wustl.edu will be the identical home directory you currently see within the ENGR Research Compute Cluster (ssh.engr.wustl.edu or https://compute.engr.wustl.edu)

If you do not utilize the Linux Lab, you and your students in your classes will see no changes to your academic environment.

Why is this being changed?

For various historical organization reasons, the “academic” and “research” home directories have been separate resources.

Over the years, the demands on the LinuxLab have grown, especially recently with the growth in machine learning and AI. There are several fundamental assumptions made in Unix/Linux about a user’s home directory, and with that home directory being different between the academic and research environments, it limits us in how we can share infrastructure between the two environments.

While Engineering IT advertises both an academic cluster and a research cluster, they have been for some time the same managed resource - certain machines were designated as “academic nodes” or “research nodes”, and as such certain jobs could only run in certain places.

This change allows us to more freely intermingle academic and research jobs as appropriate.

What is the current configuration (Spring '25)?

Currently (Spring 25), users that log into the academic Windows labs, the Remote Desktop service, or the academic LinuxLab cluster share the same home directory, and data they may access in either environment is comingled. Research cluster users have a home directory independent of that.

What happens with new students in Fall '25?

New students will be allocated both a Windows home directory and a single Linux home directory, housed in the current path in which we store our research home directories. They’ll still be limited in which resources in the cluster they can access based on group memberships and cluster scheduler configurations - not all undergraduates will automatically have access to the entirety of the McKelvey Compute Cluster.

What happens with existing students, faculty, and staff in Fall '25?

When the configurations are changed, users that log into shell.engr.wustl.edu, shell2.engr.wustl.edu, or https://linuxlab.engr.wustl.edu will be presented with either:

1. Their already existing research home directory under the path /home/compute, as seen from ssh.engr.wustl.edu or https://compute.engr.wustl.edu .

2. A new, fresh, empty home directory under /home/compute, if they did not already have a research home directory.

What about my existing data, or my home directory when I log into the Windows academic labs?

Existing data under the academic home directory will still exist, and will not be migrated. When you log into a Windows academic lab or Windows Remote Desktop, nothing will have changed.

Users will be able to access their Windows home directory and the previously created academic Linux files from the path /home/warehouse/$WUSTLKEY from all Linux nodes within the McKelvey compute cluster - they can either access those files in place, or migrate them as needed.

Our class occasionally uses both Windows and Linux environments and needs to share data between them?

That will still work! As mentioned previously, the Windows home directory will still be accessible at the path /home/warehouse/$WUSTLKEY from the Linux environment.

From the Windows academic labs or Remote Desktop, you can access the compute cluster home directory from the Windows share path \\nfs.seas.wustl.edu\home-compute\$WUSTLKEY.

What about our home directory quotas?

The Windows home directory quota will not be changed.

EIT will review each existing user’s academic home directory usage, and increase the compute cluster home directory quota by 10GB, or, if the user has a larger academic quota provisioned, the same amount as that configuration.

I have a specialized .bashrc, .bash_profile, or other environment customizations in my existing research home directory?

When you log into shell.engr.wustl.edu, https://linuxlab.engr.wustl.edu , you will be using your research compute home directory and that customization will be in your environment. All paths accessible from the academic or research sides of the cluster will still be accessible, so configurations referencing certain paths will work.

Access to RIS storage1 mounts may not be operable in certain academic custom environments, such as the VNC Desktop or Jupyter containers via https://linuxlab.engr.wustl.edu .

Engineering IT discourages referencing RIS storage1 in login scripts due to the complexity of that configuration.

I have a specialized .bashrc, .bash_profile, or other environment customizations in my existing academic home directory?

Those will no longer be in effect by default, and you will need to update your environmental setup as best fits your use needs.

Does this effect our class’s service account, if we have one?

Yes - this account will be affected by this change in the same way as every other user.

What about the login machines shell, shell2, ssh, or ssh2?

Aside from the “shell” login nodes now seeing the same home directory as ssh and ssh2, no other changes will be required or made. Engineering IT may collapse some of those services together in the future, but for compatibility purposes we will keep the same host names active.

What about my web content?

If you are one of the users with legacy web content in either of your home directories, we are going to be reaching out to you each individually.

How will we be updated during this project?

Users with both home directories will be contacted individually and in groups as this project develops, as will owners of class service accounts.

When is this change happening?

We will be announcing a cutover date soon, which should fall in the few weeks before the start of the fall semester.

I teach in the LinuxLab this summer!

If you will use the LinuxLab this summer, please reach out to us at support@seas.wustl.edu - we will also be reaching out directly to instructors with late summer courses. We will not make any changes until classes utilizing the LinuxLab are finished.

I teach using the LinuxLab this fall and I’d like to test this out before the change.

Engineering IT will be setting up a limited test environment. Please email support@seas.wustl.edu with which class you teach and which resources you use and we can help get you started.

I have a question not answered here.

Please reach out to EIT at support@seas.wustl.edu with questions and concerns. As communications begin going out to existing users, we'll update you with additional notes and changes, and will be updating this FAQ with new information.