CIS Unix Home Directories in the Clusters

All CIS Unix account holders have access to storage space on the CIS Unix machines in the form of your home directory on those systems. This provides, as of Spring 2008, 250 M of storage which can be used for holding e-mail or for files created while directly logged into the CIS Unix systems.

Your home directory is also accessible via the UNH network due to two technologies, Samba and Netatalk, which are running on the CIS Unix systems. Samba provides Windows file sharing services while Netatalk provides AppleShare file sharing services for Macintosh users. This means that if you are on a Macintosh or Windows computer that is on the campus network, you can access your CIS Unix home directory as a personal, secure, backed-up storage location. In the Student Computing Clusters, we have configured your CIS Unix home directory to automatically be accessed when you login with your UNH IT ID username and password.

Windows Systems

On the Windows computer systems, your home directory is mapped to drive letter U:. Also, the "My Documents" virtual folder is pointed at the U: drive so any time you access U: or My Documents, you will see the files in your CIS Unix home directory. This usually works automatically for all users who login to the WILDCAT Active Directory domain as the WILDCAT usernames and passwords are synchronized with the CIS Unix ones.

For faculty or staff users of the Student Computing Clusters who login with an AD account, you may receive an error message when you login about not being able to access your CIS Unix home directory. This can happen if your AD password and your CIS Unix password are different or if you do not have a CIS Unix account entirely. If you wish to request a CIS Unix account, please contact the IT Support Center in Dimond Library. If your CIS Unix password is different from your AD password, you will need to change one or the other (or both) so that they are identical in order to automatically have your home directory space accessible when using the Clusters.

Macintosh Systems

For Macintosh users, we have your CIS Unix home directory mounted under Mac OS X, and we have also directed your Mac OS X "Home" directory to that location. This means that not only can use access your CIS Unix disk space via the Home item in the Go menu of the Finder or via the Home house icon on a Finder window's toolbar or the Dock, but also, you CIS Unix disk space is used to store your personal Mac OS X Library folder. This contains preferences for how the operating system and application behave. As a result, you can customize the appearance of the deskop, change the contents of the Dock, adjust various system preferences, and modify settings in applications, and these will all be remembered when you login to another Mac OS X machine in the Clusters, even if it is in a different location.

Since you must have a CIS Unix account to use the Mac OS X machine in the Clusters and since we directly create the Mac OS X accounts from the CIS Unix account information, there is on need to specially synchronize passwords. If you wish to request a CIS Unix account, please contact the IT Support Center in Dimond Library.

It Follows You!

One very important thing to realize is that your CIS Unix home directory is automatically accessed anytime you use any Student Computing Cluster machine. This means that if you start working on a document on a Windows computer in Kingsbury Hall and save it to your U: drive, it will be available when you later login to a Macintosh computer in McConnell in your Home space. This will work on all of our systems in all of the locations which we manage. You never need to use floppy disks to save your files and carry them from Cluster to Cluster!

You also can access your CIS Unix disk space from other computers on the UNH network. This means you could, for example, get to a file that you created on one of the Cluster computers from your own computer in your dorm. You could then work on it more from your own computer, and if you save it back to your CIS Unix home directory, the new version will be easily accessible in the Clusters. For details on how this works, please see our Technote on accessing your CIS Unix home directory from non-Cluster locations.