LeTourneau Linux Network Storage Howto

by Brandon Tanner

Last Update: Nov 13, 2008

Software Requirements:

Your Linux distro should already have most of these installed, if not all. Most likely you only need to install davfs2.

Linux - hopefully Slackware ;)
Neon Client Library - 2.4, 2.5, or 2.6 (ldconfig -v | grep libneon)
FUSE or Coda support - Either one enabled in your Kernel (less /usr/src/linux/.config | grep -i fuse)
DavFS2 - Install from Source
OpenSSL or GnuTLS - Should already have it (locate openssl or gnutls)

Conventions

USERNAME - Your Local Linux Username (use whoami if unsure)
LETU_USER - Your LeTourneau User Account Name (without the @letu.edu)
# - Command is executed as "root"
$ - Command is executed as USERNAME

Do a Test Mount

# mkdir -p /mnt/tmp

# mount -t davfs https://myfiles.letu.edu/students/users/LETU_USER /mnt/tmp/

The server will ask for your LETU_USER and password, and to accept its certificate. If it all works right, the contents of /mnt/tmp will now be your LeTourneau MyFiles.

Since using root to access our files is a bad habbit, lets umount it and move on.

# cd /

# umount /mnt/tmp

Setup the davfs2 Group

In order to be able to mount davfs2 file systems using your USERNAME, we have to add your USERNAME to the davfs2 group. It is assumed that installation of the davfs2 software involved creation of the davfs2 user and group.

# usermod -a -G davfs2 USERNAME

Setup /etc/fstab

Now we can add a line to the /etc/fstab file so that we can mount our network files in our home directory. As root, append the following line to your /etc/fstab file.

https://myfiles.letu.edu/students/users/LETU_USER /home/USERNAME/letu davfs defaults,rw,user,noauto 0 0

Mount Your Letu Files

$ cd ~

$ mkdir letu

$ mount letu

The server asks for your LETU_USER and password, and possibly, to accept the server certificate. ~/letu now contains the contents of your LeTourneau MyFiles.

To umount the share, do

$ cd ~; umount letu

The output will look like the following:

/sbin/umount.davfs: waiting while mount.davfs (pid ###) synchronizes the cache .. OK

Conclusion

It was nice of the LeTourneau IT department to point Linux users in the right direction (i.e. davfs2). If you have any questions, you can always email me. If you are a LeTourneau student, you should be able to figure out my email address :P