Bringing UIC Services Home

Just in time for distance learning with UI-Online and finally for those of us who use a commercial Internet service provider to connect at home: three new Web tools that bring oncampus tools and privileges to your home or anywhere else on the Internet. (And you won't even have to log in to your tigger or icarus account to use them!)

Please send any questions about these services to www@uic.edu.

1. Bluestem requires a cookie; it won't work if you have cookies turned off in your Web browser.
2. In the process of logging on, ness.uic.edu, the UIC Bluestem server, will ask you to enter your UIC netid and ACCC password. Don't ever send your netid and password to any Web server other than ness.

"Help! I'm at home and I can't get to the Encyclopedia Britannica! (Or the OED, or the physics journals, or...) These useful third-party Web-based resources use "IP restrictions" to decide whether to provide requested services; they will only approve requests that come from the UIC campus or through the ACCC dialin lines. That used to leave a lot of us without access when we weren't at UIC.

But that's now a thing of the past. You can install a "proxy service" in your Web browser at home that will step in and redirect your request to the UIC Bluestem server, ness.uic.edu, whenever you make a request for one of these services. Log in using your UIC netid and ACCC password. After that, ness, which is at UIC and therefore passes the third-party server's IP restrictions, will act as your proxy, submitting your requests for you and relaying the replies back to you. Authenticate once per session, and you'll look to these Web services like you're at UIC no matter where you are. For more information, see Access to UIC-restricted sites via an ISP.

"Help! I'm out of town and I forgot my password!" It's happened a million times. Someone who can't easily stop by the CSO forgets their password. They call us on the phone and we have to say, "Sorry, we only change passwords in person." That is what you want us to do. You wouldn't want us changing your password without our knowing for sure that you were the one requesting it, would you?

Now, instead of saying "sorry," we have an answer, though it takes a bit of preparation on your part. How about if we let you register an additional secret before you forget your password, and do so in a way that makes it (somewhat) easy for you to remember?

Here's how it works. Before you forget your password, go to:

http://passwords.accc.uic.edu

Login with Bluestem using your netid and ACCC password. Then register a Challenge/ Response for your netid. After that, we'll reset your email, tigger, and/or icarus password if you can provide the right Response for your recorded Challenge. (The Web page has the details of case, punctuation, spacing, and what happens if you have multiple accounts.)

Note that your security in using this service is completely in your hands. Anyone on the Internet can find out your Challenge phrase, and they can make as many guesses at your Response as they have the patience to enter. Thus Challenges like "What is my spouse's name?" or "What is my favorite color?" won't do. (The first is too easy to find; the second is too easy to guess.)

Two (or three) at once: Ever wish that you could change your ACCC password without having to login or that you could change all your ACCC passwords at once? This Web page takes care of that too. (Not CMS, though, sorry!)

Unlike the other two Web services introduced here, the ACCC Directory Update Web page:

https://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap-auth/bin/phupdate

doesn't do anything new. But it does mean that you won't have to log in to tigger or icarus any more to publish your home page URL or change your uic.edu forwarding address.

The first response from the page is the UIC ness Bluestem login pages. After you log in with your netid and ACCC password, the phupdate page will display most of the information about you that's in the UIC online ph directory and in the hardcopy faculty/staff directory, with additional information about your ACCC accounts, email forwarding, and other miscellaneous data. (The ness/ Bluestem login makes the page secure; note the s in https.)

Use this page to check whether the data we have about you is correct or change selected items, such as your email forwarding address. (Just type the correct information in the fields provided and click Submit.) While the database will be updated immediately, a change in your mail forwarding address will not be effective until the next day. Make sure the data you enter is valid, particularly your email address. Your email won't be delivered if it isn't.