Introduction

Here's how to mount your departmental home directory on your Macintosh computer.

Where Is Your Home Directory, Anyway?

The first step in this process is figuring out which departmental host is the true location of your departmental home directory. Log into a departmental Linux host - "barb.cs.washington.edu", for example - and type "df | grep USERNAME" (replacing USERNAME with your username). The output will look something like this:

cash:/m-u1/u1/spencer 8089171968 60880896 8028291072 1% /homes/gws/spencer

In this particular example, "cash.cs.washington.edu" is the name of the file server that hosts this home directory.

Making The Connection

Now that you know where your home directory is located, mounting it on your Macintosh takes only three steps.

  1. From the OS X desktop, select "Go --> Connect to Server"
  2. In the "Server Address:" put "smb://HOSTNAME/USERNAME", where HOSTNAME is the name of the host, and USERNAME is your CSE username. Following the example above, I could use "smb://cash.cs.washington.edu/spencer".
  3. Connect as a registered user, putting your CSE username in the "Name:" field and your CSENETID password in the "Password:" field. Remember to check the "Remember this password in my keychain." box - it'll be important.
    (Make sure you use your CSENETID password, and not your Kerberos password. The connection is being made with Samba, which uses your CSENETID credentials.)
After you select the "Connect" button, a new window will appear on your desktop, with the contents of your home directory in it.

Making It Permanent

There are a few more steps to take if you want your home directory to automatically mount when you log in.

  1. You need to have access to the volume icon for your mounted home directory. One way is to control-click on your username in the title bar of the window that appeared when you connected to the remote file server. This will bring up an option menu; select the bottom-most name - the name of your computer.
  2. Open the "Users & Groups" control panel, and select your user account. Unlock the control panel if it is locked, because you're making a change.
  3. Select the "Login Items" tab for your user account, and drag the volume icon for the mounted department home directory into the list titled "These items will open automatically when you log in:".

You can test this by logging out, and back in, or restarting the Macintosh.

Mounting Project Directories

This method can also be used to mount a research project directory. The same steps are used, with a few small changes. For the purposes of this explanation, let us assume that "/projects/grail/marshall" resides on "sumatra.cs.washington.edu".

  1. Determine the hostname and the project folder mapping for the folder you wish to mount.
  2. Change the "Server Address:" line to reflect the new hostname and mountpoint: "smb://sumatra.cs.washington.edu/projects/grail/marshall"

Other Information

If you decide you don't want this particular directory automatically showing up every time you log in, drag that folder out of the "Login Items" window and, optionally, remove the "servername" password from your keychain, in the "Keychain Access" program.