Warning: When you connect through an commercial ISP, you are not "on the UIC campus"

Duh, right? But this has consequences. For various reasons, chiefly security, privacy, and licensing, some services, Web pages, and FTP downloads have "IP restrictions." These restrictions mean that they only work when accessed from machines with UIC IP addresses (128.248.x.x or 131.193.x.x.).

UIC Bluestem authentication can often solve this problem for people connecting from outside campus via commercial ISPs. You are also considered to be on campus when you connect through the ACCC Virtual Private Network (VPN) Gateway, regardless of what ISP you are using, which also gives you the advantage of having encrypted communications over from your personal computer to the gateway. (It doesn't work for the Library servers, though. Bummer.)

If there's a UIC resource -- including file transfers -- that you can't use from home because of IP restrictions, ask the resource's provider to contact the ACCC; we'll help them to use Bluestem authentication.

If the problem is a file transfer, you can either download the file in an on-campus lab to a floppy or a Zip disk and take the disk home with you, or you can use the two-step method: log in to your tigger or icarus account, download the file to there, then transfer the file from tigger or icarus to your machine.

There's another consequence of using a commercial ISP -- you can't use the ACCC's outgoing SMTP email servers. Changing to Your ISP's SMTP Server explains how to switch SMTP servers in most common email programs and gives the SMTP servers of many local and national ISPs. Or use the ACCC's authorized SMTP server mail.uic.edu that you can use from on- or off-campus because you login to use it. See Using the mail.uic.edu Authenticated SMTP Server.

You should also use your ISP's DNS server -- domain name server -- too, not because you can't use ours, but because theirs will be much faster.