Network shares (SMB)

Gets you your campus home directory and any group shares as folders on your machine, over SMB: an smb:// address in your file manager, or a mount command for a fixed path. Both routes are below, for the system you picked at the top of this page.

Official documentation: connecting a network drive.

Before you start

These servers only exist inside the campus network. From anywhere else, connect the VPN first. Everything below fails with a name-resolution error otherwise, which looks like a configuration mistake and is not one.

Documented values

Setting	Value
Home directory	smb://rz-home.rz.fh-ingolstadt.de/<kennung>
Group and departmental shares	smb://rz-fs.rz.fh-ingolstadt.de/
Research shares (CARISSMA)	smb://carissma.rz.fh-ingolstadt.de/
Domain	ESPL_001
Username	your campus login (<kennung>)

Some clients have no separate domain field. Those want the two combined: ESPL_001\<kennung>.

The click path

No terminal needed, and this is the better option for occasional access: the connection disappears cleanly when you log out.

In Files (GNOME) or Dolphin (KDE), choose Other Locations → Connect to Server and enter smb://rz-home.rz.fh-ingolstadt.de/<kennung>. Enter your login when prompted, and ESPL_001 as the domain.

In Files (GNOME) or Dolphin (KDE), choose Other Locations → Connect to Server and enter smb://rz-home.rz.fh-ingolstadt.de/<kennung>. Enter your login when prompted, and ESPL_001 as the domain.

In Finder, Go → Connect to Server (Cmd+K), then smb://rz-home.rz.fh-ingolstadt.de/<kennung>. If asked for a domain, use ESPL_001\<kennung> as the user name instead.

Tick Remember this password in my keychain only on a machine that is yours alone.

The terminal path

Useful when you want the share at a fixed path, for scripts, backups or a build that reads from it.

sudo pacman -S cifs-utils
mkdir -p ~/mnt/thi-home
sudo mount -t cifs //rz-home.rz.fh-ingolstadt.de/<kennung> ~/mnt/thi-home \
  -o username=<kennung>,domain=ESPL_001,uid=$(id -u),gid=$(id -g)

sudo apt install cifs-utils
mkdir -p ~/mnt/thi-home
sudo mount -t cifs //rz-home.rz.fh-ingolstadt.de/<kennung> ~/mnt/thi-home \
  -o username=<kennung>,domain=ESPL_001,uid=$(id -u),gid=$(id -g)

mkdir -p ~/mnt/thi-home
mount_smbfs "//ESPL_001;<kennung>@rz-home.rz.fh-ingolstadt.de/<kennung>" \
  ~/mnt/thi-home

uid and gid matter: without them the mount belongs to root and your editor cannot write to it. Unmount with sudo umount ~/mnt/thi-home.

uid and gid matter: without them the mount belongs to root and your editor cannot write to it. Unmount with sudo umount ~/mnt/thi-home.

The mount belongs to you already, so there is no uid to pass. Unmount with umount ~/mnt/thi-home, no sudo.

Verify

shares-verify.sh Download

Says whether the file servers are reachable from where you are

curl -fsSLO https://hutzelmann.github.io/thi-linux-macos-setup/scripts/shares-verify.sh
less shares-verify.sh   # read it first
sh shares-verify.sh --dry-run

Runs on its own. The documented values and helpers are built in, no clone needed. --dry-run prints what it would do and changes nothing.

It answers the question people actually have: is it me, the VPN, or the server? No credentials are used and nothing is mounted.

By hand:

getent hosts rz-home.rz.fh-ingolstadt.de

getent hosts rz-home.rz.fh-ingolstadt.de

dscacheutil -q host -a name rz-home.rz.fh-ingolstadt.de

No output means the name does not resolve, which means you are not on the campus network and the VPN is not up.

Known quirks

Do not put your password in /etc/fstab. The usual advice is a credentials file with mode 600, and it still writes your SSO password to disk in clear text, the password that also reaches your mail and your grades. Mount on demand instead, or use a keyring.

A stale mount hangs everything that touches it. If the VPN drops while a share is mounted, ls in that directory can block for minutes.

sudo umount -l ~/mnt/thi-home detaches it immediately.

sudo umount -l ~/mnt/thi-home detaches it immediately.

umount -f ~/mnt/thi-home forces it loose. There is no lazy unmount here.

Share names beyond the servers above are not documented here. If you know the layout of the group shares, that is a genuinely useful addition.