Mounting Your Home Directory on Unix

Overview

Mounting your home directories on a unix machine is reasonably straightforward. It takes a total of three commands to mount and unmount your mail home directory. There are some quirks, due to the fact that many of your home directories are NFS mounted to the UNIX station you are at.

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A directory

The first rule of mounting is that you must always mount the directory to a directory on the local drive. This is a very important rule because many of your home directories are actually mounts themselves. You cannot mount a mount to a mount.

The simple way to accomplish this is to go into the /tmp directory and create a directory there with your userid (such as 'bob' or mike'):

	mkdir /tmp/userid

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Mapping the Mount

Now that we have a directory created on the local drive and owned by us, we must connect to the Mail server to mount it. The command to mount the directory is as follows:

cifsmount //mailserv/homes /tmp/userid -Uuserid 

It will then prompt you for your password. Enter your password. Voila! Your mail home directory is mounted.

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Unm the Mount

There are two steps to closing your connection with the server and unmounting the home directory on the mail server.

Step 1: Unmount it from the directory

cifsumount /tmp/userid

Step 2: Log off.
The program that allows you to mount your directory is set up so multiple people can login and mount their specific directories. When you mounted your directory, you automatically logged in. This step is just to log you back off.

cifslogout mailserv  

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Command Line Info

More information on the command line functions of sharity can be found here.