Network Drives

Network drives are a valuable resource that E-Town offers its faculty, staff, and students. They can be used for document sharing for anything from clubs collaborating to faculty sharing files with their classes to students working on a group project.

Each student, faculty member, and staff member have two network folders: Public and Private. Your private folder is accessible only when you are signed into a computer connected to the E-Town network. Your public folder is searchable and alphabetized based on your last name. Any files in your public folder are given read-only access to users with an @etown.edu account.

E-Town has three network drives: Classes, Homedirs, and yourusername$. Classes allows you to access class-specific folders. Homedirs is the vast home of all faculty, staff, and students’ public folders. Yourusername$ is your own public and private folders, which can be used for backing up important academic documents or sharing files with others.

Note: on Macs, Homedirs is split into two drives; Homedirs for faculty and staff public folders, and Students for student public folders.

Access a public folder on a PC

First, you need to go to http://update.etown.edu/mapnetworkdrives.exe and download the file. Click on it and run the software, entering your E-Town username and password when prompted. When the process is complete, go to This PC. Under the Network Connections bar, you will see three new drives.

Once you have connected to E-Town’s network drives, you will not need to log in again. These files are accessible when you are on the E-Town network and not available from off-campus unless you have VPN access.

Access a public folder on a Mac

Under the Finder menu, click Go. Then click Connect to Server… Depending on which network folder you want to access, you will need a different code. These codes are:

• Classes: cifs://applications/classes
• Yourusername$: cifs://resserv/yourusername$
• Homedirs: cifs://resserv/homedirs
• Students: cifs://resserv/homedirs/students

Once you have chosen the network that you want to access, enter the code into the Server Address box and click the add button. Click Connect. Enter your E-Town username and password when prompted. The selected drive will appear.

On Macs, the network will disconnect every time that the computer goes to sleep, restarts, etc. You will need to click Connect each time you want to access a network drive. However, the computer will keep the list of drives previously connected to for ease of access. Network folders are not accessible outside of E-Town’s network.

For more information, visit the Knowledgebase’s articles on mapping network drives.