Accessing the Microwave Server

All faculty, students and staff at Bowdoin have file space on the "Microwave" server. This includes a personal drive, a department drive and a public drive. IT recommends saving all work directly to these drives as they are backed up nightly and offer a more secure space for file storage.

Your personal drive will be named after your Bowdoin username (email user id). This drive can be accessed by you and only you.
Your department drive will be named after your department. This drive can be accessed by you and all other members of your department.
The third drive is called "Scratch". It is accessible to anyone on the Bowdoin campus. You can use this to share files with people outside of your department. Please note, however, that any files you put on "Scratch" can be deleted by anyone and all files are automatically deleted after 7 days.

How to access the microwave from a pc:

From your desktop, choose start/My Computer. This will open a new window on your desktop. The window will show your "Hard Disk Drives", your "Devices with Removable Storage" and your "Network Drives". The microwave drives will show up under the "Network Drives" section.

Your personal drive is the "G:" drive, the department drive is the "J:" drive and Scratch is the "S:" drive.

Files can be opened, renamed and deleted from them using the same methods you do with your hard disk files.

How to access the microwave from a Mac

When you log into your mac, a second log-in window will appear asking if you would like to be connected to network file services. If you choose "yes", you will be asked to authenticate once for each of the 3 drives (personal, department and public (scratch). After you log in, an icon for that drive will appear on your desktop. Files can be opened, renamed and deleted on them using the same methods you do with your hard disk files.

If you do not login to your mac at boot-up, you can access the microwave on OSX by following these steps:

  • In the finder, choose Go/Connect To Server...
  • Next to the Address field, type: smb://microwave.bowdoin.edu. and click on the Connect button. At the SMB Mount window,
    • if you want to access your personal drive, select your department name and click on the OK button.
    • if you want to access your department drive, select "DEPT" and click on the OK button.
    • if you want to access "scratch", select "SCRATCH" and click on the OK button.
  • At the login window, type in your email username and password and click on the OK button.
  • An icon will appear on your desktop and a window will open. Here you can open, rename and delete files using the same methods you do with your hard disk files.