To get an account on tigger, you must be faculty or staff, i.e. you must have an entry in the staff phonebook (e.g. teaching assistants do!). Before you can get your account, you need a NetID. That will be your universal computer login for everything but CMS. Note: your u12345-style user-ID from CMS is not a NetID! Students automatically get a NetID created when they enroll at UIC. It will be the first letter of their first name, followed by the first five letters of their last name, and a number. For faculty, to choose your NetID, you'll have to contact your department's phonebook contact person. To find out who that is, click here.
Students will get an account on icarus instead. Faculty can also get accounts here, once they have their NetID. To create an account, have your SSN and your UIC i-card handy and go here.
For serious computing power, both students and faculty/staff can get an account on our super-computer, borg, by sending an email-request detailing their need for this account to systems@uic.edu - however, students will need their faculty advisor to sponsor this request. Undergraduates will need particularly good reasons for such a request. borg is the place for statistical applications using large data sets, and the REELlibrarian provides tape storage for these.
Once your Unix-account is ready, you will log in to it via telnet (NOT
via tn3270, as for CMS).The Network
Services Kit contains a telnet application (TCP3270) with pre-configured
profiles for tigger and icarus, as well as for uicvm. Note
that they use different terminal types - for a Unix machine, you need a "vt"-type
connection (that's "virtual terminal"). At startup, just select
a profile and click OK. Then you'll have to enter your new NetID as login name.
Your initial password (the number from the back of your i-card) has to be changed
right away. When you later want to change
your password, simply type passwd. You will be forced
to do this every now and then, as Unix-passwords expire! This is different
from CMS, where you just get a friendly reminder to change your password. If
you let your password expire, it is as if you had forgotten it. In all those
cases, you used to have to go in person to the Client
Services Office to get back into your account. Now we have an online password-changing
facility. To use it, you must record
a challenge/response pair while you have a working password. Then you can
later change your password online, even if you have forgotten it, by
providing the correct response to the challenge displayed by the server.
Once you have logged in to a Unix-server, you will be in your home-directory.
Unix notation for that is ~ (a "tilde"). To others, your home directory
is known as ~yourNetID. For example, as I am user volk, my home
directory is ~volk to other users, and it is located in /homes/home1
(the slashes separate different levels of folders). So, when I am logged in,
I am in /homes/home1/volk, but to me, that is simply ~.
More about Unix folders and files in the next section.
