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Northern Illinois University

Information Technology Services

Getting to your network drive

NIU students have 100MB of space on the H: drive, which can be accessed in ITS computer labs. Some faculty/staff have space on the NIU network and they may use a different drive letter. The advantage to storing files on the network is that these files are accessible to you whenever you are logged into the NIU network.

These files can also be accessed from off campus using FTP.

Why use FTP?

FTP is used to either "get" files from the network drive and store them on your local computer or "put" files that are on your local computer onto the network drive. You must have access to a FTP client program and a connection to the Internet. 

There are many FTP clients available for purchase, trial, or free download. There is a free FTP client on the ITS Downloads page called CoreFTP Lite.  One advantage of CoreFTP Lite is the setting for secure FTP.  Many programs like IE, WS-FTP and Dreamweaver do not provide a secure connection.

Use FTP to access your network drive from off campus

Regardless of the FTP client you are using to connect to your space on the network, you need the following three pieces of information:

  1. Host Name: ftp.niu.edu
  2. User AccountID: This is your fully qualified AccountID.
    For students, it will be in the form ".zxxxxxy.y.students.niu" (without the quotes), so if your Z-ID was "z123456", then your fully qualified AccountID would be ".z123456.6.students.niu".

    For faculty/staff, go to password.niu.edu. Click on Look Up and enter your last name. Click on your ID in the first column of the table. Copy the AccountID in the Authentication Credentials window. Add a period at the beginning of this to get your fully qualified AccountID. Your fully qualified AccountID begins with a period and ends with "niu" - not "niu.edu".
  3. Password: This is the password associated with your AccountID. It should be eight characters long, consisting of a combination of numbers and lowercase letters.

If you have any questions, contact the ITS Helpdesk.