Mounting your SEAS home directory on a Linux machine

Note: The commands below were tested on a SuSE 10 machine, but should work in most flavors of Linux. Please consult your man page for additional options and other features.

From within the SEAS Network

You can mount your SEAS home directory via CIFS (sometimes called SMB or "Samba"). Our CIFS server is named smb.seas.upenn.edu and you use your SEAS username.

For example, if your username was "alli", on a SuSE machine you could use:

/sbin/mount.cifs //smb.seas.upenn.edu/alli seas -o user=alli

to mount your SEAS home directory on /mnt/seas.

From outside the SEAS Network

We block all windows sharing ports because of the plethora of Windows worms and viruses that take advantage of these ports. We try to limit the number of ports blocked, but 135, 139 and 445 are blocked to decrease our risk to windows viruses. Thus, to mount your home directory from outside the SEAS network, you will need to create an SSH tunnel. For this to work, the following need to be true:

• You have root access to the machine you want to mount your SEAS directory on.
• You don't have Samba running locally on the machine.

Assuming the above are true, use the commands below. If your username is "alli":

ssh -L139:smb:139 seas.upenn.edu -l alli
/sbin/mount.cifs //127.0.0.1/alli seas -o user=alli

to mount your SEAS home directory on /mnt/seas.

If you have any questions, please send an email to cets@seas.