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Option a) Codelab - Accessing your Research Drive

This guide shows you how to get access (and retrieve/save) files on your Research Drive.

1. Background

This guide will help you to access/mount/map your Research Drive on your computer. It is assumed that you have already requested a Research Drive and that it has been allocated to you. If you have not yet requested a Research Drive, please see the Research Hub for more information.

Depending on the operating system you use (i.e., Windows()/Linux()/MacOS()), the steps to access your Research Drive will be slightly different.

Info

we have to decide if we want - tabs - expandable boxes - 3 different pages (3x Codelab)

  • Open your Windows Explorer (Win+E)
  • Navigate to 'This PC'
  • Make sure your 'View' is set to 'Details' (or use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+F1 )
  • Click on 'Map Network Drive'
  • For the Drive letter, choose a letter that is not already in use (e.g., `R:``)
  • For the Folder please enter your Research Drive location (e.g., \\files.auckland.ac.nz\research\**your_team_folder**)
    • please pay close attention to the backslashes (\\) and make sure not to use forward slashes (/) in the path for Windows
    • tick the option 'Reconnect at sign-in'
    • click on Finish
  • When you’re done, you should see the new drive letter under This PC and will be able to access its contents like you would any other folder. If you want to disconnect the network drive, right-click on it and select Disconnect.

You need to have sudo privileges to mount network drives.
Prerequisites cifs-utils and create a mount directory [required once]

On Ubuntu VM, run:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install cifs-utils
On Red Hat VM, run: 
sudo yum update
sudo yum install cifs-utils

Below is a script you can use to mount a research drive.

Make sure you adjust the name of your drive in the variable drive_name at the beginning of the script to your needs.

drive_name="rescer201800002-cer-researchfolder-test"
share="//files.auckland.ac.nz/research/${drive_name}"

# unifiles doesn't work with smb versions earlier than 2.1, and smb version 2.1 has some issues with caja file manager
# we therefore specify smb version 3.0, introduced with Windows 8 / Windows Server 2012
smb_version="3.0"

mountpoint="${HOME}/${drive_name}"
common_options="iocharset=utf8,workgroup=uoa,uid=${USER},dir_mode=0700,file_mode=0700,nodev,nosuid,vers=${smb_version}"
options="username=${USER},${common_options}"

mkdir -p ${mountpoint}
sudo mount -t cifs "${share}" "${mountpoint}" -o "${options}"
if [ "$?" -gt "0" ]; then
  rmdir ${mountpoint}
fi

If you save this code in the file ~/mount_drive.sh and give it executable permissions via chmod u+x ~/mount_drive.sh, you can then run the script like this:

~/mount_drive.sh

To unmount a network drive:

sudo umount -l ${HOME}/rescer201800002-cer-researchfolder-test

Make sure you adjust ${HOME}/rescer201800002-cer-researchfolder-test to the location you used when you mounted the research drive

  • Open the Finder
  • click on Go on the top menu bar and Connect to Server or use the shortcut Cmd+K
  • Enter your Research Drive location (e.g., smb://files.auckland.ac.nz/research/your_team_folder)
  • Make sure that you use forward slashes (/) and not backslashes (\\)
  • Click + to add the server address to the Favourite Servers section for later use.
  • Enter your user name (UPI) and password and click Connect
  • When you connect to the network drive a shortcut can be found on the Desktop
  • In the Finder side menu, you can also see the network drive under Locations