Some of you may have noticed that the university owned computers reset themselves every time you log in and out. While there are several ways/options to work around this (because you’ll never get a permanent account on a single computer, I’ve asked), this post focuses on the J Drive. Supposedly, a connection is automatically made whenever you log into your UTA account on campus… I’m making this post because nothing ever seems to work 100% of the time when we throw in complicated systems. As soon as you activate your NetID and password, the university systems create about 100-160 mb of digital storage space for you, or what is called the J Drive.
I will be covering the Mac side of this setup, and links to further tutorials will be included at the end of this post for those of you using Windows.
Basic Storage, On-Campus Setup
First, you want to make sure Finder is the application currently in use, and you can do that by clicking on the Finder application, or just minimizing all windows you have open and clicking on an empty space on the desktop. The menu at the top changes to look something like:
Now click on the “Go” menu, and scroll down to “Connect to Server”
A new window called “Connect to Server” will open and in the top box, type something similar to the following: “smb://quartz/ab/abc1234″. You’ll need to replace the first “ab” with your first two initials, and “abc1234″ with your UTA NetID.
Now, hit the connect button, wait a few seconds and you will be prompted for your UTA NetID and password. You are a registered user, so make sure that box is checked, not the guest box.
Thats it for basic storage connection setup. You can easily drag and drop files into this J Drive folder, and they will always be there regardless of which computer you are using when you connect to your J Drive. Keep in mind you only have 160 mb.
Website Space, On-Campus Setup
The university also allows you to host websites through your J Drive space, and gives you an additional 100 mb of space to do that. This website space is actually in a different place, but is linked to your basic J Drive, which we connected to above. In most cases, you will have a folder in your basic J Drive called “WWW”, and if you put website files into that folder, they will be available for viewing in most web browsers like Safari, Firefox, Internet Explorer, etc.
In the case that you do not have this default “WWW” folder or wish to connect directly to the Website space on the J Drive, you basically want to follow all the steps in the basic connection, but instead of typing “smb://quartz/ab/abc1234″ in the address box of the “Connect to Server” panel, you’re going to type “afp://students.uta.edu/StudentWebs/ab/abc1234″. You’ll need to replace “ab” and “abc1234″ as above.
To access your website, just type in the URL “http://students.uta.edu/ab/abc1234″ (and again make sure to replace “ab” and “abc1234″ with your own information). Make sure when you add your website files that you have one file named “index.html” which will be the first thing someone sees when they try to access your website.
Links / References
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