What's New with Penn State Access Account Storage Space (PASS)

Increased Quota on PASS Space:

On Tuesday, August 30, ITS increased the amount of storage space, commonly known as Penn State Access Account Storage Space (PASS) available to the University community by increasing the maximum allocation to 1 gigabyte. The default allocation is still 500 megabytes. To gain use of the additional space you can increase your quota by 100-megabyte increments or move directly to the maximum by either using the Directory Quota Manager at https://www.work.psu.edu or by accessing Directory Quotas through the Penn State Access Account Storage Space window on the Penn State Portal (http://portal.psu.edu/).

This space is available to faculty, staff, students and student organizations.

Individuals who are webmasters for student organization Web sites will be able to increase the club quota. The Quota Manager will automatically list this space as a pull-down menu option on their Quota information page. A user may increase his/her allocation in 100MB increments or increase it immediately to the 1GB maximum via the Quota Manager's "Increase your quota" feature. Changes are posted immediately.

Note that additional space is no longer added to your quota when you activate your personal (or club) Web site (WWW folder in your PASS space). This used to be an additional space allocation of 10MB for add-on services (such as Personal Web space and UNIX space) that no longer will be allocated due to the 1GB maximum. If necessary, additional space may be purchased at a cost of $0.02 per megabyte per year plus a $10 processing fee initially and each time a request for a change in a user's space is processed. For more information you can visit the Accounts web pages at http://aset.its.psu.edu/accounts. Questions about this service can be directed to the ITS Help Desk staff at helpdesk@psu.edu. Questions about purchasing additional space may be directed to the ITS Accounts Services Office at accounts@psu.edu.

Improved PASS file sharing:

Changes have been made to the PASS Explorer to provide a safe way for you to share data on your PASS space with others. The PASS Explorer provides graphical tools that allow you to manage who may access your data and what privileges those people have. You can get to the PASS Explorer from the Penn State Access Account Storage Space window on the Penn State Portal (http://portal.psu.edu/) or directly at https://portal.psu.edu/portal/new_explorer/BrowsePASS.cgi. To start sharing files, select the "File Sharing" button. This will cause the Share Manager window to be displayed.

(Note that all files managed here are in the "share" directory on your PASS space.)

The next step is to define a directory that you wish to share, modify the permissions on an existing share, or delete a share you no longer want.

For define or modify, you will be shown the window below where you can add users, delete users, or add a list of users for each of the permission classes (read & write, read only, write only). Note you could also allow anyone (with an Access Account) for these options. I suggest you think carefully before doing that!

The Delete action is fairly clear (select the userid and select delete). For the Add action you will be prompted to type in the userid (remember it is case sensitive). For the Upload List action you must have created a text file with one userid per line. Comma separated and tab separated lists do not work. The windows for add and upload list are shown below.

PASS Gateway Improvements:

On June 6, 2005 the Samba server that provides access to PASS space for Mac and Windows systems was replaced with an improved version. Instead of using samba.cac.psu.edu, you now should use win.pass.psu.edu for Windows or mac.pass.psu.edu for Mac. Why should you care? This provides a fast direct path to your PASS space. Here are examples of how to do that:

For Windows you select Map Network Drive from the tools menu of the File Explorer to get the window shown above. By adding your userid directly after "\\win.pass.psu.edu\" you will be taken directly to your PASS space. You can still use PASS instead of your userid if you wish to go to some other PASS space. Note that "\\win.pass.psu.edu\" by itself will not work. You will be prompted for userid and password if your Windows logon userid and password are different from your Access Account userid and password.

For Mac you select the Connect to Server item from the Finder Go menu. You will be prompted for your access account userid and password. Note that you must fill in your correct access account userid (OS X likes to use your real name instead). You may use the general name of mac.pass.psu.edu or go directly to your space by using mac.pass.psu.edu/ "youruserid". In the general case you are given a menu of choices like below.

When you select your userid, you will be connected directly to your personal PASS space. If you are trying to connect from an ISP external to Penn State, you will need to establish a VPN connection before you can connect to your PASS space. Note for OS X 10.4 (Tiger) you must install the latest VPN client before trying to access PASS space through VPN. If you do not, you will crash your OS X system.