Welcome to The Lab
This website along with the IT staff are dedicated to bringing creativity and technology together. We have opened this site to any student of the College of Design as a resource to learn programs, view tutorials, get advice from other students, and build a student design community that will further your experience throughout your college career.
Computer Lab Locations
| Rapson Hall | McNeal Hall |
| Lab Hours | Lab Hours |
| Rooms 33, 35, and 127 | Room 305 & 216 |
| 89 Church St. SE | 1985 Buford Ave |
| Minneapolis, MN 55455 | St. Paul, MN 55108 |
| Phone Number: 612-625-9406 | Phone Number: 612-624-5367 |
| Software Available | Software Available |
| Hardware Available | Hardware Available |
| Weekday | Hours |
| Sunday | Closed |
| Monday | 8:00am - 5:00pm |
| Tuesday | 8:00am - 5:00pm |
| Wednesday | 8:00am - 5:00pm |
| Thursday | 8:00am - 5:00pm |
| Friday | 8:00am - 5:00pm |
| Saturday | Closed |
Monday, September 1, 2008
Contacting Us
We are always open to comments and suggestions to better improve this site and the computer labs. If you would like to contact us email us at: cdescc@umn.edu
General Information
CDES Computing Labs
The CDES Computer Lab is a limited access lab. Use of this lab is specifically for:
Reasons for the Lab Hours Changing
These changes are being made for several reasons. The current card locks are limited to 1000 ID's which is insufficient for the nearly 2000 faculty, staff, and students now in the college. In order to replace the locks with ones that will accommodate the growing college, it would be necessary to spend $25,000. The college chooses to invest money in improving the equipment and software available in the labs which is of much greater benefit to students.
Another reason is a desire to bring the Rapson lab hours into alignment with those in McNeal Hall. These hours insure the same access for students in all acedemic departments on both campuses. As an additional benefit, the new hours of operation increase the number of hours students have access to plotting services by 20 hours per week.
Student saftey in Rapson Hall is also being addressed with this change. Particularly in the lower level Rapson, students often prop the lab doors open which defeats the locking system and results in uncontrolled access. In addition, unmonitored/uncontrolled access means that unauthorized individuals have access to the college's resources including "free" printing.
Finally, the academic leadership of the college wants to encourage design students to have healthier work habits. Working all hours to make deadlines fosters poor time management skills and will not impress future employers.
During undergraduate and graduate final review week, lab hours will be extended by 15 hours the Friday, Saturday, and Sunday of that week. The hours on Friday and Saturday will be extended from 6 p.m. to 12 a.m. and on Sunday from 9 a.m. to noon.
Storage
Documents Folder (D:\)
The documents folder is meant as a place for students to temporarily store their work on the hard drive while they are working on it. It may not be used as a personal, long-term storage space.
Files found on the Desktop may be removed at any time by the lab attendant.
The Documents folder will be emptied periodically by a lab attendant, so back up your work.
NetFiles
Students have access to 5 GB of FREE network storage via the Netfiles service. Netfiles replaces the old "48 Hour" storage service in the case of architecture and landscape architecture students.
We have written a short quickstart guide which you can find here:
There are two ways to access NetFiles: either by a WebBrowser, or a Client. We have installed the client on all of the computers in the lab for your convienience, the client is only available to students in the Rapson Hall Computer Labs. Please refer to the quickstart guide for information on how to use both of these methods. When uploading and accessing files from home you can only use the web browser.
That's right! Every U of MN student has access to 5GB of space that you can access from home, school, anywhere there is an internet connection. We are strongly encouraging students to take advantage of this space.
NetFiles is a web-accessible storage service meaning that files can be stored and retrieved through a standard web browser from any computer anywhere in the world. Each user is given 5 GB of space to use for their personal needs.
Besides the ubiquitous access to NetFiles, some of the other interesting features are the ability to share files and/or folders with other users of the service or even with people outside the university community. This works great for faculty who need to share files with a colleague for a paper, grant application, etc. Another nice feature is that NetFiles also has a built-in web server capability. Any files put in a special folder called “www” can be accessed as though they were web documents. In other words, you can build a web site on NetFiles just like having your own personal web server.
Special client software installed in the Rapson Hall computer labs lets the NetFiles space be accessed as though it were a network drive (similar to the Active Directory service above). There are some limitations for this including the characters that can be used in a filename and some applications (notably Autodesk software) will not save files directly to NetFiles using this client software. Information about the limitations is available here.
The college recommends NetFiles for all students to keep copies of all your important files. NetFiles is very useful in the computer lab to save files that you want to be able to access from your home computer and vice versa. It can be used with scanners to save output and then access it from a home or lab computer. In general, NetFiles is the university’s and the college’s file service for students.
Class Server
Semester-long network storage space is available to all CDes Undergraduate and Graduate Studios.
Each studio and class that allots storages is assigned a space to store their files, which is named after the course number.
If your allotted storage space becomes full, your studio must reduce the size or number of files they are storing. Alerting your studio critic to the situation is often helpful as they can require smaller file sizes, more efficient file types (e.g., .pdf) and shorter-term storage. Refer to our file size guidelines for guidance.
Archive older files to CD periodically to free up space. Back up your entire folder each week to protect yourself in case of a server crash. At the end of each semester you have three weeks to remove old folders. After that time, all folders stored on the Architecture or Landscape Architecture servers will be deleted.
To access these folders follow the instructions below for laptop use.
Accessing the Class Server from your PC Laptop
Accessing the Class Server from your MAC OSX 10 Laptop
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