Help for New Users
If you have just logged into your CS account for the first time, this is the first thing you see. This page contains some information to help first-time users get started.
This Web
This is the Computer Science Department's web. We hope you will find the answers to most of your questions here. If you look to the left, you will see a navigation bar that indicates where this page is in that web.You are smack in the middle of the technical staff's web (Computing Systems). We put you here because we created your account.
Change Your Password!
The first thing you must do is change your password. First, think of a password you can remember. It should be at least 8 characters in length, and cannot be a simple dictionary word (in any language).
Here are three methods (stolen from a Yale web page) for creating passwords that are hard to guess yet easy to remember:
1. Randomly pick alternating vowels and consonants. Throw in a digit or two (or change a letter or two to a digit) and punctuate. Mix up the case (randomly capitalize for best effect). This will create passwords that have no meaning in the real world but which can still be sounded out (e.g., Me1&BopA).
2. Combine three and four character words with a punctuation character or digit between them, modify the case of some of the letter and change some of the others to digits or punctuation -- or add digits/punctuation to the beginning or end of the password (e.g. '0Yum|fUn').
3. Randomly pick a book, poem or song. Select a phrase from the work and use the first character of each word in the phrase as your password. Capitalize some of the letters and add in at least one punctuation character and digit (or change some of the existing letters to punctuation and/or digits). For example, the phrase 'Four score and seven years ago our forefathers...' might become '4s&7YaOf'.
On a unix system, in a terminal ("shell") window, type:
% passwd(just the part in red) and you will be prompted to type in your password twice.
On a Windows system, press control-alt-delete, and select "Change Password...".
UNIX Help
If you are unfamiliar with UNIX (and you are logged onto a PC running Linux), here are some tips for getting around.The graphical user interface (GUI) you are looking at is based on the X Window System. Unlike the GUIs that Windows or MacOS present, X lets you choose how things on your desktop look and feel. The default account has a simple, functional layout, but you are free to customize it. In fact, we encourage you to - it's the UNIX way!
Visit the default environment page to find out how to move about on your desktop and manage windows and applications.
It is highly suggested you check out the Introductory UNIX Guide to learn how to use the UNIX work environment.
Windows Help
Windows machines in the CS department allow you to do and access just about everything you can on departmental UNIX machines. You can even log in remotely to UNIX machines and run programs on your screen.Files: The entire CS file system is accessible by navigating into "My Computer" and opening Y:. Your home directory is similarly located in "My Computer" as Z:. You should place all your files into either of these two places (or "My Documents," which is actually in your home directory) to ensure that they are included in the filesystem backups. Navigating through the CS filesystem can be done graphically in Windows just as in UNIX, with the exception that currently symbolic links are not understood by Windows. Tstaff will be implementing this feature shortly.
| Page Owner: Dorinda Moulton | Last Modified: Thu Aug 21 14:35:30 2003 |