Brown provides Departmental File Shares to campus departments, programs and center. The storage also integrates with some OIT services such as  our RemoteApps service.

Connect on a Mac

1. If you are off campus, connect to VPN.
2. Open Finder on a Mac (the program you use to browse your files). If you open any folder on your Mac, you will be in Finder.
3. Look for the "Go" menu at the top of your screen. From this menu, select "Connect to Server".
4. You will be prompted to enter a path (address) for the share.
   The general format is as follows, italics replaced with your information:
   smb://files22.brown.edu/dfs  (for departmental shares) or
   smb://files22.brown.edu/research  (for research shares)
5. You will be prompted to log in with your Brown username and password.
6. Your folder will open. You can open files and drag files to and from the folder.

Connect on Windows

1. If you are off campus, connect to VPN.
2. From the Start menu, select "Run" and type (replacing italics with your information):
   \\files22.brown.edu\dfs  (for departmental shares) or

   \\files22.brown.edu\research  (for research shares) 

3. If your computer is not in Active Directory (AD), you will be prompted to enter a username and password. Be certain to enter your username in the format ad\username (e.g., ad\jcarberr).

Note: You can make files available to your MyApps environment by putting them into the Documents folder.  For more details,  see "Related Pages" below.

Connecting from a UNIX machine

1. Before connecting to the service, please make sure following packages are installed: samba-client, samba-common and cifs-utils.

2. The easiest way (security implications of including password in a system generated mount) to access SMB shares is edit the /etc/fstab and include
   “<servername/sharename/folder_name>  <mount_point>  cifs user,uid=500,rw,suid,username=msusername,password=mspassword  0  0”

3. To mount securely either by using credential file or by doing auto-mount during login process, little-bit of tweaking is necessary. Following links give a good insight on how to auto-mount SMB shares on unix/linux.
   CentOS
   Ubuntu

Web-Only Connection (Mac, Windows, or Linux)

Using Brown's MyApps, you can connect to a “virtual desktop” that provides you with core apps and computational software that are available to faculty, students, and staff

1. Launch a web browser (such as Firefox or Chrome) 
2. Open this link myapps.brown.edu (click link to find out more information about Brown’s MyApps service.