Summary of diskspace for students at Penn State

There are numerous ways of obtaining diskspace and/or computing power on computer-systems provided by the Penn State University to its students, staff, and faculty. For students the two most important diskspaces are commonly referred to as the PASS space ( which includes optionally the personal webspace) and the U-drive, neither one is obtainable unless you have your ACCESS/Email account activated ( which is a MUST anyway because whatever mail Penn State sends you will be sent to your Penn State Email account ).

Overview of PASS diskspace

At the time your ACCESS/Email account is activated you automatically obtain disk storage space at computers located at University Park which are available to you until about 6 months after you leave Penn State University. Some of the about 500 MBytes of disk space of your PASS space will be used by your Penn State Portal system and your Penn State WebMail depending on whether you make use of these two facilities or not. You can keep an eye on your available space by checking your quota information at https://www.work.psu.edu/. There look for the link called "Directory Quotas".

The size and functionality of you PASS space can be expanded if you personally - on the web - apply for additional services. Most students ( and faculty ) apply for personal webspace.

Manipulating/storing files on the PASS-space

Several things have changed about the usage of the PASS space as of Aug. 18, 2008 with limited information available as of right now. Hence, the information below might be partially wrong.

There are several methods available to interact with your PASS-diskspace (which includes your personal webspace, if you had applied for that). Method 1 and 2 can be used by everybody who has a valid ACCESS/Email account with Penn State University but they are somewhat limited and are mostly used to simply copy files between your local computer and your PASS-space.
  1. Go to the Penn State Portal and login with your Penn State userid and password. Then click on the link "PASS Explorer". A new webpage will show you the current content of your PASS-space and allows you - among other things - to upload ( copy files from your local computer to your PASS space ) and download files. If you have already obtained your personal webspace you can see a folder named "www". Because this method is totally web-based you can use it from whatever computer you like to - provided it has internet access and a web browser.
  2. A secure file transfer agent ( SSH file transfer ). This program is available on all computers on the Mont Alto campus or can be downloaded to your personal computer. Go to https://downloads.its.psu.edu, login with your PennState access account ID and password. On the next webpage click on "File Transfer" and select from the menu "SSH Secure Shell" your operating system.
    The SSH file transfer agent will ask you for a hostname (sftp.personal.psu.edu) and your Penn State account name. This method is very similar to the one mentioned under 1.
  3. Mounting your PASS space is a procedure where - from your personal computer - you can make your PASS-space visible as if it were a disk on your computer. This means that you not only can up- and download files but can use them any way you see fit as if they were on your own computer.
    How to do the mounting depends on the operating system of your computer, for instructions click here.
  4. This method can be used only by students who have a LINUX account on the computers in the IST-lab ( Room 1, Bookstore Building ). By default this includes - but is not limited - to all students in my ED&G 100, IST 250, and CMPSC 101 classes. You simply log on and type the word PASS and your PASS-space is available to you any way you see fit. Of course, you need to know UNIX to use this option properly.

Viewing your webpages

The Manipulating/storing of files of your web presence has been in principle been covered under the previous section. Note though, that all of your webpage files must be located in the "www" folder of your PASS-space. This "www" folder is made available to you once you have successfully applied for your webspace account. For additional information, please go to http://www.personal.psu.edu/, there is quite some good stuff there.
If your PennState userID is, for example, xyz123 you can see your personal homepage on the web by directing your browser to :

http://www.personal.psu.edu/xyz123

Overview of U-drive diskspace

This is a windows-based disk storage place for which you MUST apply. A good starting point for everything connected to the U-drive is http://clc.its.psu.edu/DiskSpace/UDrive. In a nutshell : You have about 100 MB of diskspace available which can be accessed by methods similar to those outlined for the PASS-space. I do not know though how to access the UDrive from a UNIX-based machine. 
================
Angel https://cms.psu.edu/frameIndex.htm
Starting webpage : http://clc.its.psu.edu/Diskspace/PASS 

	>>>> "In this case, students' instructor will obtain the for his/her 
	      students from a class list"
	      A form , to be filled out by hand, can be found at
             http://aset.its.psu.edu/accounts/accountsforms/AcademicServices.pdf