UBFS

The UBFS folder in your home directory contains data and lots of other goodies you may need to access at some point. The good people at UBIT grant permissions to specified UB users to be able to access this network folder.

If you do not have a UBFS folder in your home directory, one will be created for you automatically by running the ubmount.sh script. This script sends the UBIT fileserver all the information it needs in order to grant you access to the drive. However, this script also requires you to provide it with a few parameters, which we store in a file called ubfs.keys that sits in your home directory in a place that only you can see it.

Creating a ubfs.keys configuration file

Open a terminal (ctrl-alt-T). Move to the .config directory

cd ~/.config  

Check that the ubfs.keys file exists (when you execute the touch command, if the file exists, the Last Accessed timestamp gets updated but nothing special otherwise happens. If the file doesn't exist, then it is automatically created).

touch ubfs.keys

Open the file to edit

nano ubfs.keys

In the ubfs.keys file add the following:

username=YourUBname
password=YourUBpassword
domain=AD

Of course, you need to replace YourUBname and YourUBpassword with your actual UBIT name and password (the same info you would use to log into any UB computer system, including your email).

Note: when the ubfs.keys credential file is parsed by the ubmount.sh command, the parser pays attention to every single character, even whitespaces. Naturally, whitespace doesn't show up at all in the text editor -- the only clue that it's there is that there will be space at the end of the printable characters and the cursor. Make sure you don't have any unintended whitespace in your ubfs.keys file. If there are, these whitespace characters will be assumed to be part of your username or password (which is probably not correct) and will lead to puzzling "permission denied" errors, as when there are trailing spaces in the example below (highlighted in gray for visibility):

username=joeshmoe      
password=mypassword    
domain=AD

Push ctrl-o to save, enter, and ctrl-x to exit. Your ubfs.keys file is now correctly configured for this computer (you will have to do this on each computer you work on).

Using ubmount.sh to mount the ubfs directory

Is your ~/ubfs folder empty (or nonexistent)? Well guess what, you need to mount (or remount) it!

Just open up your Terminal (ctrl-alt-T) and run the command:

ubmount.sh

Your UBFS folder should be good as new! If not, see below

What am I looking for?

After it has been mounted, your ~/ubfs folder will contain several dozen directories, only one of which contains our files. You will be looking for the following subdirectory:

~/ubfs/

This folder contains many subdirectories of useful resources and is where we plan to store all of our raw fMRI data (for the time being, at least) Note that prior to December 2018, the ~/ubfs/ folder would contain a pile of other irrelevant folders, and we were navigating to ~/ubfs/cpmcnorg/. Changes to the remote fileserver now have us directly mounting the cpmcnorg subdirectory, so we no longer have to navigate to our subdirectory. This might affect some scripts (like update_scripts.sh) that were written prior to this change.

Mounting Errors

Permission Denied

Especially for new lab members, it is possible that you were not added to the lab group of users on a particular machine (or else if you were, that you had not logged out since that time). Check with a system administrator to see if you are part of the lab group, and ask to be added if not. If you are part of that group, try logging out and logging back in again.

UBFS Unavailable

When you run ubmount.sh you will get an Input/Output Error message if there is some sort of network problem at the UBIT end of things. This is out of our control, but you can check on the status of the UBFS system at the following website before bugging the UBIT people about a problem they are already working on: UBIT Alerts Look for an alert with the heading UBFS Unavailable or something similar. If such an alert exists, just hang tight until it gets resolved. If not, ask a system administrator to file a ticket with the CASEIT group.