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Northern Illinois University

Information Technology Services

Using FTP to connect to your H: drive

NIU students, faculty and staff with a NetWare user volume hosted by ITS can access their user volume from off-campus via FTP (File Transfer Protocol).

What is a NetWare User Volume?

Your NetWare user volume is the disk space stored on an ITS-supported network server that is associated with your Novell AccountID.

Students access their NetWare user volumes via the H:\ drive in ITS computer labs. Faculty/Staff may have a different drive letter associated with their user volumes.

The advantage to storing files on your user volume is that these files are accessible to you whenever you are logged into the NIU network. Via FTP, these files can be accessed from off campus as well. 

Some user volumes have limits on the total size of files that can be stored. For example, students are limited to 50MB. Furthermore, some departments do not store their user volumes on an ITS supported NetWare server so those faculty/staff members cannot use this FTP feature.

Why use FTP?

FTP is used to either "get" files from another computer and store them on your local computer or "put" files that are on your local computer onto the remote computer. You must have access to a FTP client program and an active connection to the Internet. 

There are many FTP clients available for purchase, trial, or free download. There is a free FTP client in ITS Downloads called CoreFTP Lite.  One advantage of CoreFTP Lite is the setting for secure FTP.  Many programs, like IE, WS-FTP and Dreamweaver, do not provide a secure connection.

How is the NetWare User Volume Accessed Via FTP?

Regardless of the FTP client you are using to connect to your NetWare user volume, you will still need the following three pieces of information:

  1. The Host Name: ftp.niu.edu
  2. The User AccountID: This is your fully qualified NDS AccountID. For students, it will be in the form ".zxxxxxy.y.students.niu" (without the quotes), so if your Z-ID was "z123456", then your fully qualified AccountID would be ".z123456.6.students.niu".
    If you are faculty or staff, you can find your fully qualified AccountID at http://www.hr.niu.edu/peoplesoft/fqn.cfm. (Don't forget that your fully qualified AccountID begins with a period and ends with "niu" - not "niu.edu".)
  3. The Password: This is the password associated with your NDS AccountID. It should be eight characters long, consisting of a combination of letters and numbers.

If you have any questions regarding ftp use to access your NetWare user volume, please contact the ITS Helpdesk at 815-753-8100 or via e-mail at helpdesk@niu.edu.