jeltsch's blog

At the University of Helsinki, one can apply for group directories, which is simply disk space on a NAS. These are easily mounted when you use a university-managed computer via the university menu, but what about if you use your own machine? At least for Ubuntu Linux, the way to mount these directories has changed multiple times during the years and it again broke recently. The current entry in the /etc/fstab file in my (Vanilla, non-university-managed) Ubuntu 16.04 is as follows:

# HY group directories


Bring up the command line tool (CLI) from the browser GUI. If you use any special characters in your password, you might need to change your password first via the GUI. Despite considerable effort, I did not manage to type special characters into the CLI using Firefox on a Mac (copy-paste does not work). Assuming that you want to change eth0:

configure
set interfaces ethernet eth0 mac 00:03:0D:51:B4:D2
commit
save

sudo apt install smartmontools
sudo smartctl -a /dev/sda

or

cat /sys/block/sda/queue/rotational