Managing Aspera Connect on NoMachine

Aspera can be used on the NoMachine systems (rhino). Using Aspera requires that the plugin be installed in the browser you are running in a NoMachine session- this is a per-user installation.

This document describes management of the Aspera plugin on NoMachine.

New Installations

NOTE: these instructions indicate Firefox as the browser. This process is very similar with Chromium though some of the terminology is different

• Start a NoMachine session and run Firefox
• Enter “https://aspera.fhcrc.org” in the address bar
• Log in when prompted
• Wait a little bit- it needs a moment to detect the plugin
• It will pop up a “Required Steps”. Step 1 is to install the add-on to the browser. Click the “Install add-on” button.
• This will take you to mozilla.org where you can install the add-on. Click the “Add to Firefox” button.
• Once the add-on install is complete it will pop up a window indicating “Launching IBM Aspera Connect”. After a moment it will return the “Required Steps” window
• Follow the prompt to complete step 2: “Install Connect”
• This will download an archive named something like “ibm-aspera-connect”. Save this file
• Start a terminal session and cd into your downloads directory (most likely ~/Downloads.
• Extract this archive: tar xvf ibm-aspera-connect-3.11.2.63-linux-g2.12-64.tar.gz (change the name of the target file to that downloaded in the previous step)
• this will output the name of a shell script to run- run this script with: ./ibm-aspera-connect-3.11.2.63-linux-g2.12-64.sh
• It will have some output indicating that it’s being installed. Once complete the browser will refresh, returning you to the Aspera start page.

Upgrading

If you have an old version of Aspera installed you will (on login to Aspera) be prompted to update.

• from a terminal session, remove the old installation (e.g. rm -r ~/.aspera) or move it out of the way (e.g. mv .aspera .aspera.no)
• follow the steps above. It will skip past the installation of the add-on and take you straight to Step 2