Thursday, December 1, 2011

Day 59: Droppin' the knowledge bombs up in here!

So much for McGill's IT Knowledge Base. Count this as a win for me then!

IT services maintains a pseudo-wiki of answers to every technological issue you could ever have. How-tos, troubleshooting, information... it's really very informative and quite useful.

Because of it, I learned how to not only access the school's VPN from home, and my iPad, but also how to print to their uPrint system directly from the comfort of my own home. They're also very good about updating and adding new issues as they appear/are reported, like WebCT's inability to display PDFs properly on an iPad.

However, when I was on campus, wanting to connect to my P: drive (the personal drive, each student has their own) from a computer I could not log onto with my own McGill ID, it looked like I was out of luck. They only had instructions for setting up a connection so it appears on your computer as a remote drive. Honestly, I don't keep very interesting things on my P: drive, but I still don't want just anyone using that computer to have access... who knows what they'd put on it!

But then I noticed how they were instructing you to connect... They wanted you to put a specific URL into some annoying Windows wizard. But...

Lesson 59: Going directly to the website https://webfolders.mcgill.ca/students/[insert short username here] allows full access to your P: drive through your web browser! No annoying set up, no opening your drive for the world to see, you just need your short username and your password. Exactly what I needed!

Which makes me wonder...

Why don't they just list that as an option?

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