Logging in for the First Time

  Go to the information desk at the ITS laboratories (in the 'field library' near the tennis courts). Tell them you are in CIS 15 and need to use the Sun computers. They will give you your account information and a statement for you to read and sign. The statement promises that you will not use your UNIX account for any purposes other than legitimate academic ones. The front desk folks will direct you to a Sun computer (you will have to leave your ID card at the front desk).

 The account information that the front desk gave you contains two pieces of information:

  1. Your username (also known as an account id) which is probably your last name, or a part of it, with your first or both your first and middle initials at the beginning.
  2. Your temporary password, which is some bit of random nonsense like JY3v87m.

 When you get to the computer, the screen may be dark - that's OK; it's just the screen saver at work. Just press the RETURN key a few times (one may be all it takes) and the s creen will light up and you will get the login prompt (where it says "login:"). At the prompt, type in your user name:

login: username 

It will then respond with the password prompt (where it says "password:"). At this point type in your temporary password:

password: temporary_password

Important Notes:

  1. The password does not appear on the screen when you type it! (This makes sense; it's supposed to be a secret.) That makes typing a bit harder so take it slowly and carefully. 
  2. There are upper and lower case letters in the password. You must type upper case when the letter are upper case and type lower case when the letters are lower case - in other words, in UNIX, x and X are not the same letter.

 If you make mistakes in typing your username or your temporary password, you will be given additional chances to log in. When you get it right, you will be logged in but (for this first time) you will only be allowed to change your password (fort unately!)

 Hopefully you will have thought of a good password before you get to the Atrium. It must be between 6 and 8 characters long, and it should have at least 2 characters that are letters and at least 2 characters that are not letters. The lett ers in the password should not constitute a name or a word in any language. At the same time, the password should be something you can remember without writing down because you should not the password down anywhere!

 The system will ask you to type in your old password (the temporary one) and your new password twice (to make sure you don't accidentally make a typo in your password). It will then log you off automatically and tell you to come back later, after it has updated the password files across the network. This may take as little as 20-30 minutes or as long as an hour.

 When you come back to log in the second time, you should be able to give your username and the new password you selected (which you can change later if you want to). This time you won't get logged out automatically; instead you will see several l ines of messages. Then will see the "shell prompt" - something which looks like

$ atrium90>

and indicates that the system is ready to receive your commands.

One of the messages you will see reads something like

If you need to select a course, enter 'do_sp' or 'do_sp cis##sect' at the prompt.

Ignore this message! When you see the prompt, you can simply begin entering UNIX commands as discussed in class.