Your Computer Science (COM S) Account grants special privileges, such as access to the Microsoft Developers Network Academic Alliance, disk space, a personal web page, and access to departmental support services. It is important to note that your Computer Science username and password is completely separate from your ISU Net ID and password. It is recommended that you maintain separate passwords for each account.

Students are eligible for a Computer Science account if they are:

• an undergraduate or graduate student with a Computer Science major.
• enrolled in a Computer Science class.

Some classes have group accounts; students enrolled in these classes are not eligible for accounts.

In most cases, a formal account request is unnecessary. At the beginning of the semester, most accounts are pre-initialized based on enrollment data received from Iowa State University.

Occasionally, this data may not be representative of recent adds or drops. In these instances, students may use the online form to request an account. This service is only necessary after the first week of classes has started.

When available, this form is located at https://support.cs.iastate.edu/apps/account.php.

You activate your Computer Science account by filling out the online form located at http://register.cs.iastate.edu/.

You will need to fill out the form completely. If you are in our account database of eligible users, your COM S will be created immediately. We receive our information about new students on the first day of classes, so you may not be in our database until then.

Undergraduate and graduate accounts remain active until the student leaves the department or university (i.e. graduation or changing majors).   Visiting instructor/scholar accounts remain:

• As long as the account holder is involved with the department, or
• Until deemed necessary by a faculty member.

Class accounts for non Computer Science majors will be deactivated at midnight on the Friday following finals week. Students eligible for a COM S account in the following semester will have the opportunity to create a new account during the first week of class; old accounts will not be reactivated.

Due to the limited amount of disk space provided to students, there may be points in time when you need to archive your files to increase the amount of free disk space on your network drive.

You have several available options; some of the more common are:

• Backing up to floppy disks,
• Burning to a CD-R, or
• Creating an archive and transferring it to another account.

Most workstations have USB 2.0 ports and CD Burners available. Backing up your files is as simple as dragging your files from your home directory (usually mounted as the H: drive) into the burning program and writing them to the CD-R.

If you would like to FTP your files, use the tar command on a Linux workstation to create an archive of the files you wish to save. For example, issue the following command to save the directories “dir1” and “dir2” into a tar archive called “myfiles.tar”:

   UNIX> tar -cvf myfiles.tar dir1 dir2

To extract this archive on the remote machine after you have transferred it, log in and issue the command:

   UNIX> tar -xvf myfiles.tar	

You may find it useful to use a compression utility to reduce the size of the archive before transferring. Please check the online manual pages for tar, gzip, bzip, and zip for more information.

Account extension may be requested:

1. To postpone the deactivation of an account,
2. To increase the disk space on an account, or
3. To increase the effective permissions of an account

To request an extension, fill out the form at http://support.cs.iastate.edu/account.php

Extensions require the sponsorship of a faculty member. After submitting your form, please have your sponsor contact the SSG authorize this extension.

Using strong passwords protects your data and that of others using the systems. If an account is compromised, not only is the account’s data compromised, but it could also lead to a larger problem on the system as a whole. If you suspect that your account has been compromised, please contact the SSG.

SSG recommends that your password contain at least one character from three of the following four sets:

Choosing characters at random can make a very strong password; however, such as password is likely to be forgotten. The best way to make a secure, random password is to use a mnemonic - which can be done by choosing a saying, song lyric, or verse from a poem. Use the first letter of each word as one part of the password.

For example, “Do or do not, there is no try.” (Yoda, Star Wars) could be written as:

dodntint

Using a little bit of clever replacement, this password can become:

D0d!Tin+

Note that since this password is published, it should never be used.

When typing the password, just think about the movie and recall all of the letters and replacements. In a short time, using the password will become second-nature, and it will be easy to remember.

1. Always use a secure password (see above)
2. Change the password often (see above)
3. Never give the password to anyone
4. Do not use the same password on all systems (i.e., if you have accounts at other schools, Web sites, etc.)
5. Never use the following as part of a password:
   1. Dictionary words
   2. Any part of your name
   3. Pet's names
   4. Any information others can look up about you

If a password is forgotten, it will need to be reset by a member of the SSG staff. The SSG will not reset passwords for accounts over phone or email. Password resets can be handled at the SSG staff office in Pearson 0125.

Every account includes space to place a personal web page. Simply create a file named index.html inside the WWW directory of your account. The home page will then be available at:

http://www.cs.iastate.edu/~username/

Please note that the file ~/WWW/homepage.html should be mode 644. You will need to log into a Linux machine to take care of this.

UNIX> chmod 644 ~/WWW/homepage.html

Graduate students and staff may have their web page added to the department's web directory by sending a request to webmaster@cs.iastate.edu.

The webmaster is not a member of the Systems Support Group. Further questions about web services for the Department of Computer Science should be directed to webmaster@cs.iastate.edu.