============================================================================= Disk filespaces and quotas on the Mount Holyoke College computer systems Michael A Crowley 14Aug99,5Nov03 Account Spaces ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- This is an introduction to the various network disk spaces your computer account may be allocated. It touches on, but does not give details about, how to gain access to these disk spaces. That is described in the "filespace" document (www.mtholyoke.edu/lits/network/doc/filespace.txt) Associated with your computer account are a number of different disk locations for files (filespaces). Each of these have separate and independent maximum disk usage allocations, or quotas. The various network spaces available are: INBOX Incoming email. HOME The home directory is your basic directory for email. world Personal web space. web College web space. webcourses Faculty course material distribution via web. oncampus courses Faculty course material distribution on local network. classwork For academic purposes, current students only. classweb For academic purposes, current students only. workgroups depts Departmental shared space. workgroups research Shared space for specific research or other projects. distribution Software distribution Access to these spaces may be personal, public, or restricted to certain groups. Access is also differentiated by whether it is for viewing only (READ-ONLY) or for update and modification (READ/WRITE). Finally, access may be by a variety of methods, such as shell or ftp, mapped network drives, or web. The details of these methods follow. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Access to all of these filespaces may be done in several ways, each having its own advantages: 1. Logging into the computer system (shell login) and using basic UNIX commands and programs to view contents. For example, email can be read with the UNIX program called "pine". 2. Connecting a Windows or Macintosh computer to the disk space over the network. This is known as "mapping a network drive" in Windows or "using a network folder" on a Macintosh. In this way files stored on network disk space can be seen as local to your computer and you can then use programs like Microsoft Word on these files. Forget concepts like "downloading"; you simply can drag files from your local computer to the network and back again, or you can access the files directly with programs like Word. 3. Using a program on your local computer, such as Thunderbird, to view your email and netnews from the server. 4. Using a web browser, such as Firefox, to view files served by the web server. Not all files can be viewed in this way. But a web browser such as Firefox can also view local files directly on your computer. Note, when you connect your computer to network space as in #2 above, those files are seen as "local" to your computer. Firefox and Thunderbird are products of Mozilla and are recommended for web browsing and email access respectively. See: http://www.mozilla.com ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Some of these filespaces are: INBOX: All accounts are provided with an email INBOX. This is for new mail and one should remove messages from the inbox as soon as feasible by either deleting the message or saving the message in a folder. The amount of disk space available for messages saved in folders is much higher than the disk space available for the inbox. The inbox should be thought of as transitory storage while the saved mail folder area is for more permanent storage. HOME: All accounts also have a HOME directory. Saved email is located here, along with other personal files you might own. This is your primary disk space. Note, your HOME directory contains "dot files" -- files beginning with a period, such as .cshrc, .login, .pinerc, .newsrc. Never alter those files unless you know what you are doing. Never delete them! Your account may not start up properly if any of these files are removed. world: All accounts are provided with web space for personal use. We call it "world" to indicate that material placed here can be obtained by anyone in the world. web: We refer to the "official" college webspace as "web" to differentiate it from personal webspace, known as "world". While all computer accounts can view files in this webspace, you need special permissions to add or modify files here. These permissions are granted in special areas of "web" as needed. If you need to work on a student organization web site or an academic department web site, your account will be provided with such access. courses -- webcourses and oncampus courses: Teaching faculty accounts are provided with space for course materials in a couple of places. One course area is for distributing course materials on the web and another is for campus-only distribution of course materials and is non-web based (as of August 1999). Faculty can also permit others to work in their course areas with them. For more information on the courses areas: At the MHC system prompt, enter: see courses Using a web browser: http://www.mtholyoke.edu/lits/network/doc/courses.html To view a faculty member's web course area, you only need to know the faculty member's username. For examples, if you wanted to see course pages of Jan Smith or Alan Durfee: http://www.mtholyoke.edu/courses/jgsmith http://www.mtholyoke.edu/courses/adurfee To see who has registered course pages: http://www.mtholyoke.edu/courses classwork: Student accounts are provided with space for academic purposes. This space is for materials directly related to academic work. This space should not be used for non-academic files such as personal email, pictures, music, etc. not directly related to a course or your academic research. One can, however, also use this space for temporary storage when transferring files from one computer to another. For example, you could store personal pictures from your computer here in order to copy them to a zip disk in one of the public computer labs. Since the purpose of this space is academic, the file names may be public even though the contents of the files remain private (unless you widen the read permissions to others). This space is for current students only. It cannot be used after graduation and will be removed the semester after graduation. This space is linked off of the HOME directory and is therefore quite easy to access. The quota limits are flexible and generous when academic need is demonstrated. This space can be accessed by any networked computer. It is not necessary to carry a vulnerable floppy diskette around with you. You should maintain BACKUPs of material you store here. It is best to routinely archive material to zip disks or CD. Public lab computers have zip drives or CD writers if your computer does not. The classwork area is designed for current materials. Older materials should be copied to your local computer and to zip disks or CD for backup purposes. classweb: This space is similar in purpose to "classwork". It is for current students and is for web pages for assignments in specific courses. Once the course is finished, material here should be removed. Like other web spaces, material here is public to the world. workgroups depts: This space is for shared departmental use. Access to departmental areas is restricted to members of the departments. There are also public distribution areas in this space. workgroups research: workgroups projects: This space is provided by request for faculty research or other projects which might not be appropriate in the courses area. Access may be tailored for specific groups. distribution: This is a read-only area for the distribution of public software, or software for which we have a site-license. This is the place to find Firefox and various other programs that we recommend for all computers on campus. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Quota limits on disk space: The various filespaces have separate and independent limits on the amount of disk space you can use. These limits are called disk quotas. To view your disk quota information for the various network filespaces to which you have access, log into Horde Webmail/Webshell, go to the Webshell section and click "Disk Quotas". It is a good idea to view this information occasionally to get an idea of the space available to you and how it is being used up. https://webmail.mtholyoke.edu/horde/webshell ============================================================================= Related information: see filespace or http://www.mtholyoke.edu/lits/network/doc/filespace.txt see courses or http://www.mtholyoke.edu/lits/network/doc/courses.html (The "see" method is used in the "Help/See Documents" section of Webshell.) =============================================================================