Creating a CS Account

To access the computing resources of the department, you will need to set up a CS Account. There are three types of accounts depending on whether you are a Computer Science Major, a Computer Science graduate student, or are a non-major taking a Computer Science course in which a CS account is required. Reguardless of which of these catagories you fall into, the procedure for creating your account is the same. Non-major class accounts are removed from the system promptly at the end of each semester.

Following the instructions in the How to Access Computer Science Department Servers tutorial, login to the server shell.cs.fsu.edu with the user name newacct. The password is newacct. You may also use your own prefered SSH client if you wish.

After logging into shell as newacct, it will ask you to enter the newacct password again so that the script may log you into the account generator.

Follow the instructions provided by the new account generator. You will be required to read and accept the Usage Policy and to create a password for you$

The Computer Science Department maintains a strict password policy. Read the instructions for creating your password very carefully. These rules, as well as some things to keep in mind when making your password are as follows.

Your password must:

• be exactly 8 characters long.
• contain at least one CAPITAL LETTER.
• contain at least one lower case letter.
• contain at least one number. (0123456789)
• contain at least one special character. ex: !, @, #, $, ^, &, *, (, ),<, >
• NOT contain any part of your first name, last name, or user name.

As a general rule, you should not use any real, dictionary word as part of your password. Even common abbreviations should not be used. Two good ways to pick your password are to play the "license plate game" or to use an acronym. As an example, I could use the sentence "I pound on my desk for enjoyment regularly." to represent the password "I#omd4er". Please note however, DO NOT USE THIS PASSWORD. It is provided only as an example.

Take special care at this point to mentally record both your user name and password. Writing down this information is highly discouraged, but you will need it to access any of computer resources provided by the Computer Science Department.

Now that you have an account, follow this link for some very important information on how to keep your account secure.