Access from Linux

You will need to know the path to your home directory. Currently the easiest way to determine this is to login to a University or YoYo desktop workstation and look at 'This PC'. Here you will see your U: drive already mapped for you, which will allow you to take note of your own unique path.

U Drive screenshot showing the path

In this example you can see the path is

\\stfdata09\home\CS\Cs1ijb

Note in the example above the path includes the slash (\) characters, the text in the brackets and the username of the account, in this case Cs1ijb

This will vary for every person since its private and no two people share the same path

Instructions vary throughout the many varieties of Linux. The steps below work with Ubuntu 18.04, but will be similar for other distributions.

Use Search

Browse to your storage

The steps below work with the Gnome 3 desktop which comes with many linux distros

  1. Click on Files on the left hand toolbar menu
  2. Click on 'Other locations'
  3. Type your Personal Storage path into the field where it says 'Connect to Server' and press the Enter key

smb://stfdata09.shef.ac.uk/home/CS/Cs1ijb

  1. When the login box appears, select Registered user
  2. Replace the username with your University username
  3. Replace the Domain with shefuniad.shef.ac.uk
  4. Enter your university password and click Connect
  5. A new window will open showing your Personal Storage

Bookmark your storage

  1. Once the new window showing your storage has opened, right click where it shows your Personal Storage path in the left hand menu
  2. Select Add Bookmark from the options menu
  3. This will add it as a permanent link on the left menu
  4. If you wish to rename your bookmark, right click on it and select rename
  5. Next time you want to access your storage, simply click Files from your Ubuntu tool bar then select your storage from the left hand menu.
Use terminal

Use a mount point on your local filesystem

  1. Open a new Terminal window
  2. Make sure the cifs-utils package is installed using the following command:

sudo apt-get install cifs-utils

  1. Make sure the keyutils package is installed using the following command:

sudo apt-get install keyutils

  1. Created a directory to mount the shared area against. In the example below the directory name is udrive, which follows the convention used on the University managed desktop:

sudo mkdir /mnt

sudo mkdir /mnt/udrive

Mount the Personal Storage (Home directory) in the mount point directory created in step 4 by entering the command below, replacing USERNAME with your University username e.g. cs1ijb, and replacing LOCALUSER with your local user account name e.g. fred

sudo mount -t cifs //stfdata09.shef.ac.uk/home/CS/Cs1ijb /mnt/udrive -o username=USERNAME,rw,file_mode=0700,dir_mode=0700,uid=LOCALUSER,gid=LOCALUSER

Now when you browse into the directory called /mnt/udrive, you will see any shared areas you have access to:

cd /mnt/udrive

If you are following these instructions from off-campus then please remember to connect to the University's VPN service.

Updated May 2021