Getting started with the Yoda Network Drive

You can upload and download data to Yoda, by using the Yoda Network Disk on your laptop or PC. This will add a network drive to your computer that contains your research data. Once the Yoda Network Disk has been configured, you can use your existing applications and tools to work with the data.

Credentials

To access Yoda via the network disk it is required to get a temporary credential, called Data Access Password.

Prerequisite

The user (researcher, group leader or data manager) must have a valid account to access the YODA website.

To get the data access password for your user account follow the instructions on the page Creating a data access password.

For Windows users

Mapping network drive
 

Open “This PC” from the Start menu.

Open the Computer menu item and select “Map network drive”.

Select a drive letter — any free letter is okay. Now enter the server address of the environment in the Folder field: https://erasmus-data.irods.surfsara.nl

Ensure the box “Connect using different credentials” is checked and click on the Finish button.

You will be prompted for a name and password. If you are working on your personal PC or laptop, tick the checkbox “Remember my credentials”. If you are working on a shared computer, it is better not to tick this checkbox for security reasons. Click on the “OK” button.

The Explorer screen will show the folders you have access rights to. You can now drag and drop your files to upload or download them.

Increasing maximum file size

By default, the native WebDAV client only works with files smaller than 4 GB. You can increase this limit to 4 GB if you have a local administrator account:

• Open the registry editor by pressing the start button, entering “regedit” and pressing the enter key.
• If you are asked whether the registry editor should be allowed to change the system settings, confirm.
• Navigate to key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\WebClient\Parameters
• Open the FileSizeLimitInBytes key.

• Set it to FFFFFFFF (hexadecimal)

• Click on the “OK” button and close the registry editor
• Restart your computer

If you don’t see the Finder icon, you can alternatively start Finder by pressing the command key and the space bar, then typing “finder” and pressing enter.

Now press the command key and the “K” key to connect to the Yoda server. You should now see this dialog:

Enter the server address of your environment, (https://erasmus-data.irods.surfsara.nl).

The Finder app will show a confirmation dialog, similar to the one below. The address shown in the dialog should be the address you entered in the previous dialog.

Press the Connect button.

You should now see a credentials dialog. The “Connect as” setting should be set to “Registered user”. Tick the checkbox “Remember this password in my keychain”. Click on the connect button.

You should now have a new Yoda Network Disk location in Finder. Its name is the network address you entered before. You may have to scroll down in finder in order to see it.

For Linux users

GNOME users can connect to the YODA Network Disk using GNOME Files (also known as Nautilus in older versions of GNOME). Alternatively, if you are comfortable with using commandline tools, utilize davfs2 to mount the Yoda Network Disk. The Cadaver commandline WebDAV client is also compatible with the Yoda Network Disk.

Connecting using GNOME files

GNOME users can connect to the Yoda Network Disk with GNOME Files (also known as Nautilus in older versions of GNOME).

Click on “+Other Locations” and enter the server address (https://erasmus-data.irods.surfsara.nl) in the “Connect to Server” bar.

Then click on the Connect button.

You will be prompted for a name and password.

Connecting using davfs2:

This page describes how to connect to the YODA Network Disk on a Linux system using davfs2. It assumes familiarity with using command line tools. The instructions are suitable for RedHat-based distributions (e.g., Fedora or CentOS) and for Debian-based distributions (e.g., Ubuntu).

Installing the package

Install the davfs2 package.

For Debian/Ubuntu:

• sudo apt -y install davfs2
• Confirm that unprivileged users should be able to mount davfs2 volumes (“Yes”).

For RedHat/CentOS/Fedora:

• sudo yum -y install epel-release
• sudo yum -y install davfs2

Configuring group membership

Look up your username, uid and gid using the “id” command.

Add your user account to the davfs2 group: sudo usermod -aG davfs2 user (replace “user” with your username).

Close the terminal window and open a new one to activate the group change.

Configuring Davfs2

Open the davfs2 configfile in a text editor (e.g., sudo vi /etc/davfs2/davfs2.conf). Ensure parameter delay_upload is set to 0 (zero). This limits the risk of data loss from a failure to flush data after large file transfers.

Open the /etc/fstab file in a text editor (e.g., sudo vi /etc/fstab) and add a configuration line for the YODA Network Disk:

https://erasmus-data.irods.surfsara.nl /mnt davfs user,auto,uid=1000,gid=1000 0 0

And adjust the parameters as needed:

• If you’d like to mount the Yoda Network Disk in a different location, replace /mnt with a different local directory.
• Replace the uid and gid parameters with your uid and gid, as shown by the id command.
• If you don’t want the YODA Network Disk to be mounted automatically after your system starts, remove “auto,” from the options.

Now use a text editor to create a secrets file, which contains your Yoda Network Disk URL, Yoda username and password, separated by spaces. Example of a secrets file: “https://erasmus-data.irods.surfsara.nl j.jansen@eur.nl mySecretPassword”. You need to escape any backslashes and double quotes in your password with a backslash (e.g., use “\\” instead of “\”).

Install this secrets file as the global davfs2 secrets file:

• sudo install -m 0600 -o root -g root secrets /etc/davfs2/secrets
• rm secrets

Mounting the YODA Network Disk

The disk should be mounted automatically after a reboot if you have configured the “auto” option in /etc/fstab.

To manually mount the Yoda Network Disk:

• On Debian/Ubuntu: mount /mnt
• On RedHat/CentOS/Fedora: sudo mount /mnt (you can ignore any warnings about writing to the mtab file)

This documentation is derived from https://servicedesk.surf.nl/wiki/display/WIKI/Connecting+to+Yoda+via+network+disk

This page was last updated in July 2023. Did you find a broken link or (seemingly) incorrect information? Please send an email with the title 'Website content' to datasteward@eur.nl.