Using smbclient

It is also possible to transfer files from your University M drive and from the shared N drive using the smbclient tool. This is a command line tool included by default on ARC that allows for file transfer experience similar to SFTP.

To connect to your M drive you are required to know the ds path to your M drive. This should follow the pattern \\ds.leeds.ac.uk\<group>\<groupNUMBER>\. Connecting to the shared N drive is possible using the folowing ds path \\ds.leeds.ac.uk\shared\.

To find the ds path to your M drive open the file explorer on a campus PC or a Virtual Windows Desktop and select your M drive from the shortcut list, or type M:\ into the navigation bar and press return. The navigation bar will now display your M drive ds path in the format \\ds.leeds.ac.uk\<group>\<groupNUMBER>\.

Once you know the ds path to your M drive you can connect to it within the smbclient when on ARC using the command:

$ smbclient -U medacola //ds.leeds.ac.uk/****/****/ --directory medacola # **** signify removed content
Enter DS\\medacola\'s password:
Try "help" to get a list of possible commands.
smb: \\>

You are prompted to log in using your standard University of Leeds password and once successful the prompt switches to the clients prompt smb: \>. The option --directory is used here to specify that we want to log into a specific M drive (if you don’t include this you’ll be logged in a level up from your person M drive and need to cd USERNAME into your personal M drive). You can get a list of all possible commands for this prompt by typing help and using this client to download files will download them into the directory you were in on ARC when you used the smbclient command. You can leave the smbclient anytime by typing exit to return to ARC.

To download files from your M drive onto the current directory you’re in on ARC you’d do the following:

smb: \\medacola\\> get test.sh
getting file \\medacola\\test.sh of size 19 as test.sh (18.6 KiloBytes/sec) (average 18.6 KiloBytes/sec)
smb: \\medacola\\>

To upload a file from ARC to your M drive (In this instance on ARC I have a file called testfile in my current directory I want to transfer to my M drive) we use the following command on ARC:

$ smbclient -U medacola //ds.leeds.ac.uk/****/****/ --directory medacola -c 'put "testfile"'
putting file testfile as \\medacola\\testfile (0.0 kb/s) (average 0.0 kb/s)