Unix Home Folder Service

Unix Home Folder Service

Purpose

University staff or students who make use of the Unix service are allocated a Unix Home Folder so that they have a secure place in which to keep their Unix based work.

Access

Your Unix Home Folder is automatically mounted for you when you log into any of the timesharing Unix systems.  Your Home Folder path will be of the form "/home/ucs/XXX/loginid", where "XXX" will be a three digit number.

You can transfer files to and from your Unix Home Folder using SFTP/SCP.  You can also access your Unix Home Folder from a campus Windows machine using the Samba service.

Quotas (How much space?)

Quotas for the Unix Home Folder service are the same as the regular Home Folder Service.

Undergraduate and Taught PostGraduate (PGT) students
  • Default: 1 GB
  • Upper limit: 4 GB

More space may be requested by tutors for students on courses involving heavy-usage software, e.g. CAD. Students may request more than the default 1GB by completing an application form on the Web.

Staff, and PostGraduate Research (PGR) students
  • Default: 2 GB
  • Upper limit 4 GB
  1. The "Upper Limit" for Staff/PGR filestore is what users may acquire by application online to ISS; beyond the limit, an initial consultation should be made with your School Computing Officer.
  2. Some staff or PhD students may find that their allocation is set at the lower level: this is usually because they are former undergraduates. These users should apply online to ISS to have the quota raised to the staff allocation.

Backups and data retention

  • Your Unix files are backed up on a daily basis to protect against system failures. These backups are not available for any other purpose. It is your responsibility to take any necessary steps to protect against accidentally deleting or overwriting your files..

Expired accounts

You will receive an automated message from ISS a month before your account expires; at which point you should make your own copies of your data if you wish to keep it.  Home Folders, Home Archive Folders and Profiles are automatically deleted after 3 months. Once deleted, this data cannot be retrieved.

Service Availability

  • Service is scheduled to be available 24/7/365 with the following exceptions.
  • When system maintenance is carried out this will usually be scheduled for ISS’s normal “At Risk” period, which is Tuesdays 0600-0900.
  • Some systems are automatically re-started for maintenance purposes between 02:00 and 05:00 on Wednesday Mornings, causing an outage of 10-15 minutes.

Notification of service interruptions

  • ISS publish Messages of the Day on the University Home pages; these are part of a comprehensive news publishing system. In the case of filestore and other infrastructure systems, MOTDs are reinforced by email messages sent to individual users who will be affected.

Support

  • Requests for support should be made via the ISS Helpline however there is also a mailing list "Unix-users" for informal discussion and questions about Unix.  This is a good place for questions and queries. 

    The list has an online archive of past questions. Members of ISS are available via this list to provide advice.