Account Management Tools for
Computer Science Systems

Note: Your computer science user ID is your University NetID. You must have a University NetID before you can activate a computer science account. Here's the Univeristy's tool for activating your NetID: https://netid.rutgers.edu

Computer science systems use passwords that are separate from your University password. You can make them the same, but it is somewhat better from a security point of view if you use different passwords.

• Lifetime of accounts and files

  When users leave the University (or computer science), their accounts are closed. Files are archived. They will be deleted after a year, except for faculty files. Shared directories will be deleted or archived based on the user that owns them.

  Sometimes users will have a continuing association with the Department even after leaving. Accounts may be continued as guest or retiree accounts. Any faculty member can sponsor a guest. The Computer Science Department handles retirees.

• Activate an account on a Computer Science system

  This will let you create an account for Computer Science Department systems. Computer science faculty, majors, grad students, and students enrolled in computer science courses other than 110, 170 and 494 are eligible for accounts.

• Set or reset your Computer Science password.

  This will show you a University login screen. So as long as you remember your University password, you set or reset your CS password. If you need more security than a simple password can afford, please see two factor authentication.

• Group and Guest management. This will you create and manage groups. This is useful for three purposes:
  • If you want to share files with a group of people, you can create a group that lists the people and then change the permissions of the file so they can access it. For more help with this, see Sharing files.
  • If you are authorized (normally faculty) and want to allow grad students or collaborators to access reseearch or instructional systems, you can create a guest group. For help with this, see Managing your guest users.
  • If you are runniing your own computer cluster, you can use groups to control what users are allowed to login.

• Consider giving us contact information, in case we need to reach you for support reasons.

  You can set additional information using "ipa user-mod" on any of our systems, e.g. "ipa user-mod YOURNETID --phone=8484452001". "ipa user-mod --help" will give a list of what can be set. "ipa user-show YOURNETID" will show your current information. You only need to do this once. The same information applies to all of our systems. Note that changing first name, lastname, and GECOS won't do anything useful, since we reset them to the official University names nightly.

• By default, everyone uses the bash shell. To change to tcsh use "ipa user-mod YOURNETID --shell=/bin/tcsh" any of our systems.

• Two-factor authentication. In case you need more security than a simple password can provide.

• Integrating your computer into Kerberos . How to set up your computer to use Kerberos. (This is for computers located in computer science department areas. For systems at home, see Working at Home.)

• Sharing files between systems

• Technical information on our security and account setup.