File Transfer

Your Fortran program seems to be writing a large file of stripe size 1, resulting in an error like:

forrtl: No space left on device, forrtl: severe (38): error during write, unit 12, file /lustre/scratch/$USER/...

Move the partially transferred file elsewhere or delete it. Then, cd to the directory where the partially transferred file once was. Issue the following command to change the striping of the directory:

lfs setstripe . -c 8

Examples of this error are

File transfer server could not be started or it exited unexpectedly.
Exit value 0 was returned. Most likely the sftp-server is not in the path of the user on the server-side.orReceived message too long 1500476704

These errors are usually caused by commands in a shell run-control file (.cshrc, .profile, .bashrc, etc.) that produce output to the terminal. This output interferes with the communication between the SSH daemon and the SFTP-server subsystem. Examples of such commands might be date or echo. If you use the mail command to check for mail, it can also cause the error.

You can check to see if this is likely the problem. If you are unable to SFTP to a machine, try to connect via SSH. If you are able to SSH, and you receive output to your terminal other than the standard login banner (for example, “You have mail”), then you need to check your run-control files for commands that might be producing the output.

To solve this problem, you should place any commands that will produce output in a conditional statement that is executed only if the shell is interactive. For C shell users, a sample test to put in your .cshrc file would be

if ($?prompt)
  date
endif

The equivalent command for your .profile file (ksh/bash) would be

if [[ -n $PS1 ]]; then
 date
fi

The SSH-based SCP and SFTP utilities can be used to transfer files to and from NICS systems.

For larger files, the multistreaming transfer utility BBCP may be used. The BBCP utility is capable of breaking up your transfer into multiple simultaneously transferring streams, thereby transferring data faster than single-streaming utilities such as SCP and SFTP.

For more information on data transfers, see the remote data section of the data management page.