UNIX Overview

UNIX Accounts

UNIX accounts are automatically created for every student, faculty and staff member at the University of Southern California. In order to activate it, simply fill out the webpage at www.usc.edu/firstlogin. After completing this form, it will ask you to set a password: an hour after this, you'll be ready to go.

There are several types of UNIX accounts ITS provides:

• Student Computing Facility Accounts - A UNIX or computer account is created automatically for all students who are registered for a degree program at USC. The account will remain active as long as you are a registered student at USC.

• Research Computing Facility Accounts - A UNIX account is now created automatically for everybody who is on the University payroll. The resources available for RCF accounts are much greater than those availed to SCF accounts: see our Server Overview page for specific details about these machines.

• Health Sciences Campus Accounts - Provides students, faculty and staff on the Health Science Campus and at the School of Dentistry with general computing resources.

UNIX Account Policies

All computer account users are required to read and abide by the ITS Computing and Usage Policies. You can review the ITS computing polices on-line at www.usc.edu/its/policies/).

• Keep in mind that you have a disk usage quota on your account that you should monitor. To see what your usage is, type quota -v at the UNIX prompt. The quota, usage and limit will show up in a list. To request more space, contact your department's Authorized Signer.

Accessing UNIX Accounts

From a Sun Workstation - Sun workstations in user areas run either the CDE or the OpenWin windowing system. To login, type in your username, press Return, and then type in your password and press Return. The CDE windowing system will then automatically start. To select another windowing system, go under the Options pulldown menu and find your windowing system of choice under Sessions.

From an Networked Windows or MacOS Computer - (in ITS computer labs, on ResNet, or in on-campus offices)

Windows 95 - From the Start menu, select Run and then type in the command telnet hostname where hostname is an appropriate time-sharing host.

MacOS - From the Internet Tools folder, open the NCSA Telnet folder and double-click an appropriate Telnet icon.

Dialing in Using PPP - ITS provides PPP accounts that allow you to access Internet resources such as World Wide Web through a dial-up connection. Information about establishing PPP account and obtaining freely distributed software is available as printed documentation in user areas, or on-line at www.usc.edu/its/doc/dialup/.

Logging in to your UNIX account

To login to any ITS host, type your username at the login: prompt and your password at the password: prompt.

The UNIX Prompt - Once you successfully enter your username and password, you will see several system messages followed by a UNIX prompt. The UNIX prompt indicates that the system is now ready to accept commands. The UNIX prompt will look similar to the line shown below:

almaak.usc.edu(1):

Your Password - You can change your password at any time by typing passwd at the UNIX prompt. If you accidentally forget your password, you can contact the Customer Support Center at 213-740-5555 to have your password reset.

Note: When you type in a password, the characters do not appear on the screen.

Logging Out - To log out of your UNIX account, type logout at the UNIX prompt.

Last updated: Monday, August 03, 2009, 14:17PM PDT