Connecting to network drive with a smb mount

[Emily Schartz]

Hi all,

We have a Linux computer to host our instance of BitCurator, but I've been unable to get to connect to the network drive where we store our born-digital collections. Does anyone in this group have experience getting a their BC machine to connect to a network drive through a Samba share? 

Best,

Emily Schartz

Digital Accessions Specialist

University of Chicago Libraries

[Kathryn Antonelli]

Hi Emily,

We do, and we use the file explorer GUI to connect. So, open Files, scroll down to "Other Locations" in the sidebar on the left, and then type your "smb://[serveraddress]/[topleveldirectory]" in at the bottom of the window where it says "Connect to Server". It should pop up with a sign in prompt. You would likely use your UChicago login info (not the Bitcurator laptop login info, assuming it's different) for the username and password. You might need to change "Domain" to the first part of your server address (eg uchicago.lan) instead of the autofilled "WORKGROUP"; if you think that part is what's not working, then the domain name would probably be a question for IT. 

Hope that helps! 

Best,

Kat

Digital Archivist

American Philosophical Society

[Kam Woods]

Of note: BitCurator 5.x does not include the "cifs-utils" package out of the box. This is required for accessing these types of shares; if you don't have it installed, you can install it from a terminal with:

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install cifs-utils

If your attempts had not been previously working, you should now be able to follow the file explorer GUI guidance in the previous reply. It should also now be possible to create a permanent mount point, store your smb credentials and workgroup name in a file, and place a line in /etc/fstab to automount the share any time the system is up. It's likely undesirable to have your credentials stored plaintext on the machine, although there is at least one utility that can assist in managing an encrypted version of that, as well. Let me know if any of that is interesting and I can follow up off-list.

We should probably update the documentation to address some of these items for modern LTS installs.

Kam