If you have a work laptop, you can take it home to do work. But what if you have a desktop computer and need to access it from home? The technology to make this possible exists for more than 20 years, but if you think that University IT has made this easy for you, you would be wrong. In fact, I don't know anybody who knows how to do this easily.
sudo apt-get install sg3-utils (only needed the first time)
ls /dev (to check whether sr0 or sr1, usually it's sr0 unless you had already other USB drives connected)
sg_raw /dev/sr0 EA 00 00 00 00 00 01
In the cross-platform environment of our university, at least three different OS connect to the smb shared group directories. Apparently Macs are able to save files with characters that are not allowed on other platforms and which cannot be easily deleted. Recently we had several files which ended with a '.' (dot) or a ' ' (space), and we were not able to remove them via the GUI. In Windows 7, I managed via the command line with:
delete "file." or
delete "file "