Network drives include your Unifiles home folder, Unifiles research drives and other network file systems that start with //machine_name. This tutorial will mount one of your research drives..

If you want to mount some other location, e.g. a faculty drive, you’ll need to change the path according to your requirements.

Prerequisites: Install cifs-utils and create mount directory [required once]

You need to have sudo privileges to mount network drives.

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

Mount a research drive

Below is a script you can use to mount a research drive (should you have one).

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

#!/bin/bash

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

Unmount a network drive

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

Make sure you adjust the target of this command, ${HOME}/rescer201800002-cer-researchfolder-test in this example, to the location you used when you mounted your research drive.

–

If you want to create symbolic links within the research drive, add the option mfsymlinks to the list you provide in your mount command (continuing from the code above):

options="username=${USER},${common_options},mfsymlinks"