Mounting Network Drives

Contents

  1. Mounting Network Drives
    1. Mounting in Windows
    2. Mounting in OS X
    3. Mounting in BU Linux 5
    4. Mounting in BU Linux 6, other Linux distributions, or any OS that can run SSHFS
    5. Mounting from Off Campus

Mounting in Windows

To map the network drive in Windows:

  1. Right-click on "My Computer" on the desktop or on the start menu
  2. Click "Map Network Drive..."
  3. Select a suitable drive letter.
  4. Type in path to network drive (see table below)
  5. Check "Reconnect on Login" if desired.

Drive Letter

Address

N

\\eng-support\support

X

\\eng-home\users\1st letter of the user's account name\2nd letter of the user's account name\users account name e.g. for user jsmith: \\eng-home\users\j\s\jsmith

U

\\eng-research\research

V

\\eng-courses\courses\eng_courses

W

\\eng-admin\administration\eng_administration

If you are using a computer that is not on the AD domain, you will need to login using your kerberos username and password. This is done by clicking "Connect using a different user name." or "Connect using different credentials" on some newer machines. If you simply click "Finish" without entering your info, Windows will send your current username and password. The path to the x: drive is.

If authentication is required (for all computers that are not on the ad domain), be sure to prefix the user's kerberos name with ad\. E.g. if the user is jsmith, the username field should contain 

ad\jsmith

and the password field should contain the user's normal kerberos password.

Mounting in OS X

To map a network drive in OS X:

  1. Open the the "Connect to Server" dialog by clicking Go->Connect to Server under the finder or by using the hotkey Apple+K.

  2. Type in path to network drive (see table below).
  3. Click on the "+" to save the entry.
  4. Click connect.
  5. In the new dialog, make sure the "Workgroup/Domain" field reads "AD".
  6. Make sure the "Username" field contains your kerberos username.
  7. Type in your kerberos password and click OK.

Drive Letter

Address

N

smb://eng-support/support

X

smb://eng-home/users/1st letter of the user's account name/2nd letter of the user's account name/users account name e.g. for user jsmith: smb://eng-home/users/j/s/jsmith

U

smb://eng-research/research

V

smb://eng-courses/courses/eng_courses

W

smb://eng-admin/administration/eng_administration

?

smb://engna1.bu.edu/administration/pho_administration

You will be asked to fill in your authentication information every time you connect to a server.

If you would like to add a shortcut to the network drive to your desktop:

  1. After you have mounted the network drive, find its icon on the desktop.
  2. Right-click (or Ctrl + Click) on the icon and click "Make Alias".

If you encounter error: -36, this is likely because the Network connections does not want to accept "-"s in the address. Try using one of the following alternative addresses.

Drive Letter

Address

N

smb://ad/eng/support

X

smb://ad/eng/users/1st letter of the user's account name/2nd letter of the user's account name/users account name e.g. for user jsmith: smb://ad/eng/users/j/s/jsmith

U

smb://ad/eng/research

V

smb://ad/eng/courses

W

smb://ad/eng/administration

?

smb://engna1.bu.edu/administration/pho_administration

Mounting in BU Linux 5

Please follow the instructions at KerberizedNFS.

Mounting in BU Linux 6, other Linux distributions, or any OS that can run SSHFS

It's a pain to mount kerberized shares on other linux distributions, so we strongly recommend that you use SSHFS. You will need to enable fuse in the Kernel (under Filesystems) and modprobe fuse if you compiled it as a module. The sshfs package is usually called fuse-sshfs. It is not a part of the BU Linux repositories, but was a part of Gentoo, for example. Your experience may vary. An RPM can be found here:

http://dag.wieers.com/rpm/packages/fuse-sshfs/

With sshfs installed, mount the share as follows: 

sshfs -o workaround=rename user@enggrid:/ad/eng/<share> /<local mount point>

the "workaround=rename" option is recommended to ensure that certain programs, such as Subversion, work properly.

You may also find various tools for mounting SMB shares under other Linux OS's. Your mileage may vary, so we recommend SSHFS as described above. If you want to try this, though, here are some simple instructions for the tools that are provided in Ubuntu Linux. In Ubuntu, there are two ways to mount network drives, as a link on your desktop or as part of your file system. This may also work in other distributions but it is not guaranteed. To map a network drive in Ubuntu using the Connect to Server wizard:

  1. Goto Places->Connect to Server...

  2. Select Windows Share under Service type
  3. Enter the server as listed in the Mac OS X section excluding the smb://
  4. Click Connect. You do not need to fill any of the optional information.
  5. You now should have an icon on the desktop to connect to the server.
  6. Double click this icon and you will be prompted for your user account information.
    • - Enter your kerberos login for Username - Enter ad for Domain - Enter your kerberos password for Password
  7. Click Connect
  8. A new window should open with the contents of the server.

To map a network drive in Ubuntu to your file system (in the /media directory):

  1. Follow instructions at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MountWindowsSharesPermanently under the Mount password protected network folders section.

  2. Be sure to use cifs as the drives are hosted on Windows Server 2003 and to not provide your user account information directly in the /etc/fstab file as anyone on the sudoer list would be able to see this information.

To add to the last instruction, a valid line to mount a share ( in this case a research share ) looks like the following: 

engna1.bu.edu:/Research/eng_research_something /mnt/research    cifs credentials=/home/your_user_name/.credentials,iocharset=utf8,file_mode=0777,dir_mode=0777 0       0

where eng_research_something is replaced with a valid share path and credentials=/home/your_user_name/.credentials is the file that contains your username password ( see the Ubuntu example ). It seems that for all users of a non-AD (not tested on an AD connected machine so - someone else can verify) connected machine it may be necessary to add "allow_other" to the mount options. One important thing to note is that permissions on the folder will be those of the user specified in .credentials - playing with the permissions on the client side (changing the options in fstab) may conflict with those granted by the kerberos account.

To quickly get a list of available net-bios paths ( this is the path that will be used in your fstab): 

bash# smbclient -L engna1 -U ad\\your_username

And to find a list of folders one can also use 

showmount -e engna1

Showmount is included in nfs-utils. Note that you can't mount the network shares as nfs - they must be cifs, but showmount is a nice tool to quickly list remote folder names.

Mounting from Off Campus

To mount the network shares from off campus, you'll have to connect to the VPN before the above instructions will work. The instructions for doing so on a number of different operating systems are maintained by IS&T and can be found here.

Eng-IT: MountingNetworkDrives (last edited 2013-04-22 11:14:03 by caseytb)