User Mounting Owncloud Contextualization

Goal

The goal of this page is to explain a method to ease file transfers between your laptop and a VM.

ULB and VUB users can obtain an ownCloud storage space by connecting to https://owncloud.ulb.ac.be and authenticating with their NetID. By mounting your ownCloud folder on a VM, you can ease data transfers between your personal laptop and the VM : every file that you create in your ownCloud folder on your laptop will almost instantly be available on all machines where you have mounted your ownCloud folder.

Since ownCloud storage space is exported using WEBDAV protocol, the method described on this page can be adapted to any similar cloud storage technology offering a WEBDAV interface, like for example B2DROP. You just have to change the URL of the WEBDAV interface.

Procedure to mount the ownCloud folder

Adapt and run this script as root on the VM (in most cases, the only thing to adapt will the login that is 'cloudadm' in this example) :

#!/bin/bash

echo "nameserver 193.58.172.6" >> /etc/resolv.conf

yum -y install davfs2

USERC=cloudadm

usermod -aG davfs2 $USERC

mkdir /home/$USERC/owncloud
mkdir /home/$USERC/.davfs2

chown $USERC:$USERC /home/$USERC/owncloud
chown $USERC:$USERC /home/$USERC/.davfs2

cp -n /etc/davfs2/secrets /home/$USERC/.davfs2/secrets

chown $USERC:$USERC /home/$USERC/.davfs2/secrets
chmod 600 /home/$USERC/.davfs2/secrets

echo "https://owncloud.vub.ac.be/remote.php/webdav USERNAME PASSWORD" >> /home/$USERC/.davfs2/secrets

echo "https://owncloud.vub.ac.be/remote.php/webdav /home/$USERC/owncloud davfs users,rw,auto 0 0" >> /etc/fstab

If you don't have root access on the VM, you can copy/paste this code in the contextualization section during the VM creation process.

After that, you need to replace the token USERNAME and PASSWORD in the last line of your ~/.davfs2/secrets by their real values (your ownCloud username and password, that should be your ULB-VUB NetID and the corresponding password), and mount ownCloud by issuing this command :

mount ~/owncloud

If you want to unmount, simply do :

umount ~/owncloud