NESTOR is the storage and archive server at the Computing Centre.
For details about the configuration, please see the NESTOR announcement.
In case you haven't noticed, NESTOR stands for NEtwork STORage.
Yes you can, the procedure to request access to NESTOR depends on the categories specified hereunder.
All members of the VUB (students and personnel) have an account on NESTOR, or can activate one if they wish.
Persons who have an account on HYDRA automatically get an account on NESTOR. Persons who do not have an account on HYDRA or NESTOR can request an account on NESTOR through the User Registration Form.
NESTOR is an storage and archive server, not an interactive server. You will only be able to transfer files to/from NESTOR, you won't be able to login on the server.
You can store and retrieve files from NESTOR through FTP. Users with an account on HYDRA can also access their files on NESTOR from HYDRA, in the directory /a/username You won't be able to login on NESTOR with telnet or remote shell.
If you wish to access files through FTP, you can FTP to nestor.vub.ac.be or nestor.ulb.ac.be. See details on FTP.
You can also access your NESTOR files by mounting your NESTOR directory as a local network drive on your local computer (SAMBA). See the details on how to proceed.
You can examine your diskquota on NESTOR from MACH or HYDRA with the command
nesquota
While you can, we prefer at the present time that you do not do so. You can off course make archives (zip, stuffit, tar, ...) of the files you wish to backup and transfer them to NESTOR (see above on how to access NESTOR), but since disk quota are installed on NESTOR, you won't be able to backup your whole computer. See also next section.
This is currently being investigated.
You don't. The password on NESTOR is synchronized with the password of your MACH account, that is the account of your e-mail address which is hosted at the Computing Centre. For details about changing passwords, see our Passwords FAQ.