Research Storage can be mounted directly on your computer under certain conditions. When mounted directly, the storage appears as a drive letter under Windows or a folder under Linux, Unix, or macOS. You can read and write to the storage just like you do with your computer’s hard drive.
Research Storage may only be mounted on computers that satisfy either of the requirements below:
On-campus computers such as an office workstation or server in a lab can be configured to mount the storage if the computer:
Any computer connected to the campus virtual private networking (VPN) can be configured to mount the storage. See the Virtual Private Networking (VPN) website for instructions and other information.
| Location | Connection Type | Computer Access Granted | Storage can be mounted? |
|---|---|---|---|
| On-campus | Wired ethernet | Yes | Yes |
| On-campus | VPN | Not Necessary | Yes |
| Off-campus | VPN | Not Necessary | Yes |
| Anything Else | No |
OIT Research Storage may be accessed over the network using either NFS or SMB.
NFS (Network File System) is commonly used to access network storage from Linux and other UNIX-like operating systems including macOS.
When the NFS protocol is used to mount OIT Research Storage, you must ensure that your client is using NFS protocol version 4 (NFSv4). NFSv4 includes significant security improvements over previous versions such as NFSv3.
NFSv3 is still commonly used and may be the default version utilized when attempting to mount the storage from some operating systems. This is important to know if you have trouble mounting the storage. You may need to explicitly specify an option such as nfsvers=4 when mounting the storage.
One of the security enhancements provided by NFSv4 is the ability to require users to authenticate via Kerberos in order to access network storage. OIT Research Storage is configured to require users to authenticate to the Wolftech Active Directory (AD) domain in order to access the storage.
This is important to know because your operating system needs to be configured to be able to use the Wolftech AD domain for authentication.
OIT Research Storage is configured to require encryption for data sent over the network when accessing files using NFSv4 for privacy protection.
This is important to know because you may need to explicitly specify a security option when mounting the storage. For example, on Linux you may need to add a sec=krb5p option or mounting will fail.
See the Mounting Research Storage on Linux page for more information.
SMB (Server Message Block) is typically used to access network storage from Microsoft Windows computers, but may also be used to access the storage from Linux, macOS, and other operating systems.
Versions of the SMB protocol prior to version 3 (SMBv3) may not be used to access OIT Research Storage.
Client computers must be running Windows 8, Windows Server 2012 or newer in order to access OIT Research Storage via SMBv3. Older versions of Windows including Windows 7 can not support SMBv3.
See the Mounting Research Storage on Windows or Mounting Research Storage on macOS page for more information.