Mounting IC home directories

The CMTH cluster is completely separate from the College’s network. Nevertheless, it is sometimes useful to access your home directory on the College’s system.

Adventurous users and those fond of the command-line might like to investigate the fusesmb or smbclient programs, but the easiest way is to use thunar, Xfce’s file browser.

  1. Find out which server your home directory is stored on using ICT’s Homedirectory Finder You will be told that your home directory can be found at (something like) \\icX.cc.ic.ac.uk\USER where icX is a server name (e.g. icnas3) and USER is your (College) username.
  2. Launch Thunar.
  3. Select from the main menu: Go -> Location.
  4. Enter as the location smb://USER@icX.cc.ic.ac.uk/USER, where icX is the value you found in the first step and USER is your College username.
  5. Click the Open button.
  6. If prompted, enter your (College) username, IC for the domain and your (College) password in the appropriate boxes and click the Connect button.
  7. Thunar will now have access to your College home directory.
  8. If you wish to access the directory through the command line, the above process will mount the directory in /run/user/$(id -u)/gvfs/smb-share:server=icX.cc.ic.ac.uk,share=USER,user=USER/. Here $(id -u) gets substituted with your user id on our system. You can run this command first and substitute in the number manually if your prefer. Once you have the directory, you can create a symbolic link to this in your home directory as it will be mounted in the same location every time.

Mounting RDS home directories

While the IC home directories have quite limited space, RDS home directories now have 1 TB of backed up space per user in their home directory. This is the space used for your home directory if you use the Imperial HPC services such as CX1.

To easiest way to mount this is the same as the procedure for the IC home directories, except the location should now be set to smb://USER@rds.ic.ac.uk/rds/user/USER/ where USER is your College username. A symbolic link can also be created to the directory once mounted as above if you wish to access it through the command line.

In the mounted directory you’ll see three directories:

  1. ephemeral - which has no quota but all data is automatically deleted 30 days after it is created.
  2. home - which is your actual RDS home directory as on CX1. Files here count towards your 1TB quota.
  3. projects - contains any project allocations you have access to.