Mount Research Storage on Linux

Linux Requirements

Authentication Configuration

In order to mount the storage using NFSv4, the computer needs to:

Be joined to the WolfTech Active Directory domain and use WolfTech for user authentication
Be configured to allow mounting using NFS version 4 with Kerberos authentication
- The rpc-gssd service needs to be properly configured and running for this to work

You may not mount Research Storage on personally-owned Linux devices because such devices are not permitted to be joined to NC State’s Wolftech Active Directory domain.

Please check with your department’s IT staff for help with configuring your computer to use the Wolftech Active Directory domain.

Installed Packages

The package that provides NFS client functionality and the mount.nfs utility needs to be installed.

RHEL / CentOS / Rocky / AlmaLinux

sudo dnf install nfs-utils

Ubuntu / Debian

sudo apt install nfs-common

Network Requirements

Off campus: You must be connected to NC State’s Virtual Private Network (VPN) .
On campus: A connection to the NC State network (wired or wireless ) is recommended. Otherwise, you must be connected to the NC State’s Virtual Private Network (VPN) .

Determine the NFS Mount Path

You will need to know the NFS mount path of the storage in order to mount it. The network path for each Research Storage share is conveniently shown on the Research Storage Manager page.

Go to the Research Storage Manager page and login with your NC State credentials
Locate the Research Storage share you want to mount
In the Storage Access section, locate the Linux line under Mount a drive to your computer
Copy the network path to your computer’s clipboard by clicking the blue icon on the right:

How to Manually Determine the Network Path

The instructions above are sufficient if you only need to know which path to use to mount Research Storage. This section describes how the paths are determined. It may be useful if you need to programmatically construct the network paths.

Individual Shares

The network path for Individual shares follows this format:

rs.oit.ncsu.edu:/rs1/researchers/<FIRST INITIAL>/<UNITY ID>

For example, if your Unity ID is jbdoe, the network path for your Individual share would be:

rs.oit.ncsu.edu:/rs1/researchers/j/jbdoe

The directory named after your Unity ID will not exist until you have set up your Individual Share. See the Individual Shares page for instructions on how to do that.

Project Shares

The network path for Project shares follows this format:

oitrspprd.hpc.ncsu.edu:/rsstu/users/<FIRST INITIAL>/<UNITY ID>/<SHARE  NAME>

You do not need to mount multiple paths if you have access to multiple Project Shares. You can simply map a single drive to the the “users” directory and then navigate down to the Project Share directories you have access to:

oitrspprd.hpc.ncsu.edu:/rsstu/users

Mount the Storage

Configure /etc/fstab

Add a line like the following line to /etc/fstab to mount OIT Research Storage when the computer boots:

rs.oit.ncsu.edu:/rs1/researchers/j/jbdoe  /jbdoe        nfs4 sec=krb5p
oitrspprd.hpc.ncsu.edu:/rsstu/users       /rsstu/users  nfs4 sec=krb5p

The local directory used to mount the share (/jbdoe and /rsstu/users in the example above) can obviously be anything you like. You need to first create the local directory if it does not already exist in order to mount the storage:

sudo mkdir /jbdoe
sudo mkdir -p /rsstu/users

The remote share may be mounted at the /rs1 (individual shares) or /rsstu (project shares) directory or lower.

Mount Shares

Mount all shares listed in /etc/fstab:

mount -a

Run the mount command without any options to view the currently mounted filesystems. Pipe the command to grep to only display the OIT Research Storage NFS share.

mount | grep rs.*nfs4

You should see a line similar to the following:

oitrspprd.hpc.ncsu.edu:/rsstu/users on /rsstu/users type nfs4 (rw,relatime,vers=4.1,rsize=1048576,wsize=1048576,namlen=255,hard,proto=tcp,port=0,timeo=600,retrans=2,sec=krb5p,clientaddr=x.x.x.x,local_lock=none,addr=x.x.x.x)