Network storage

Available locations

There are several storage systems available to connect to on the University network:

Personal Filestore (via SSH)

  • Location: sftp://ssh.soton.ac.uk/home/$username/
  • Protocol: SSH/SFTP
  • Linux friendly semantics: Yes

This is your central university storage or ‘filestore’. Data stored here is backed up and available on Linux, Windows and Mac OS X computers. You can also access data stored here via Filestore Web Access.

Personal Filestore (via SMB)

  • Location: sftp://ssh.soton.ac.uk/home/$username/
  • Protocol: SMB1, SMB2
  • Linux friendly semantics: No

You can also access your personal filestore via the SMB protocol (the Windows file sharing protocol). If you connect via this method then you will not be able to set or view file/directory permissions, create symbolic links or use any other POSIX (Linux/UNIX) features. Due to this it is strongly recommended that you utilise SSH instead.

Linux Shared Filestore

  • Location: sftp://ssh.soton.ac.uk/research/$groupname/
  • Protocol: SSH/SFTP
  • Linux friendly semantics: Yes

Many research groups and departments have access to shared storage locations specifically designed for use from Linux systems. These are available at the above location. Data stored here is backed up. You can also access data stored here via Filestore Web Access.

Other Shared Filestore

  • Location: smb://filestore.soton.ac.uk/$sharename/
  • Protocol: SMB1, SMB2
  • Linux friendly semantics: No

Many other shared locations exist, such as the “J: drive” shared storage locations. These are available at the above location. Data stored here is backed up. You can also access data stored here via Filestore Web Access.

These locations are unfortunately designed for use by Windows users. You will not be able to set or view file/directory permissions, create symbolic links or use any other POSIX (Linux/UNIX) features.

How to connect

There are various methods of connecting to network storage:

via the file browser

If you’re using GNOME (the default), XFCE, MATE or KDE then you can simply open the file browser and enter the location you want to connect to by pressing Ctrl+L or clicking Connect to server in the menu. You will be prompted for a username and password as necessary.

We strongly recommend you use this mechanism to connect to network storage. You can also access the connected storage from other applications and the command line. Once connected they are available via the normal file system here:

/run/user/$uid/gvfs/

via FUSE (SSH only)

If you prefer to connect to networked storage on the command line only, you can do so using the sshfs command. We strongly recommend you use the above mechanism (the file browser) instead since that can also be accessed from the command line.

If you do want to use sshfs directly then run the command like so:

sshfs [user@]host:[dir] mountpoint

For example, here is how to connect to your personal filestore as testuser:

mkdir ~/personalfs
sshfs testuser@ssh.soton.ac.uk:/home/testuser/ ~/personalfs

You can then later disconnect with:

fusermount -u ~/personalfs

via the mount command

You can also instruct the kernel to mount network storage if you desire. This can however be quite complicated and this documentation only covers the basics.

You can use the mount command via sudo if you are in the sys group (see Permissions for more information). You can thus use the command like so:

sudo mount <options>

Here is an example of how to mount personal filestore via the cifs driver with the example username testuser:

mkdir ~/personalfs
sudo mount -t cifs -o username=testuser,password=<password>,domain=soton.ac.uk //filestore.soton.ac.uk/users/testuser/ /home/testuser/personalfs/