Modified: Jan 23, 2025

Computer Science user ID is your University NetID. You must have a University NetID before activating a computer science account. Here’s the University’s tool for activating your NetID: https://netid.rutgers.edu

As of January 2025, Computer Science Linux systems use the same passwords as University NetID for students if they log in on a physical machine in the Lab. An account will automatically be created upon your first login.  Account activation is done automatically upon the first login.  

Remote users, faculty, and staff must activate the account manually and set a password.

• Activate an account on a Computer Science system.  Remote users, faculty, and staff must activate the account manually and set a password.

• Set or reset your Computer Science password. It will show you a University login screen. So, as long as you remember your University password, you can set or reset your CS password. Students can choose to use the CS Linux system with university credentials, but faculty/staff must use separate CS Passwords for security reasons.
  
  
• If you need more security than a simple password can afford, you must use CS Password and add a two-factor authentication.
  
  
• Group and Guest management. This will help you create and manage groups. This is useful for three purposes:
  • Sharing Files: If you want to share files with a group of people, you can create a group that lists the people and then change the file’s permissions so they can access it. For more help with this, see Sharing files.
  • Sponsoring Access: If you are authorized (normally faculty) and want to allow grad students or collaborators to access research or instructional systems, you can create a guest group. For help with this, see Managing Your Guest Users.
  • Control Logins: If you are running your own computer cluster, you can use groups to control users’ ability to log in.
    
    
• Other info. Consider giving us contact information if we need to reach you for support reasons. You can set additional information using “ipa user-mod” on any of our systems, e.g. ipa user-mod YourNetID --phone=8485551212, ipa user-mod --help will give a list of what can be set. ipa user-show YourNetID will show your current information. You only need to do this once. The same information applies to all of CS Linux systems. Note: Changing the first and last names and GECOS will be useless since we reset them to the official university names nightly.
• Linux Shell. By default, everyone uses the bash shell. To change to tcsh, use ipa user-mod YourNetID --shell=/bin/tcsh on any of our systems.
• Two-factor authentication. In case you need more security than a simple password can provide.
• Integrating your computer into Kerberos is a how-to to set up your computer to use Kerberos. (This is for computers located in computer science department areas. For systems at home, see Working at Home.)
• Sharing files between systems
• Technical information on our security and account setup.
• Cron jobs. For systems that use CS Linux accounts, cron jobs need special attention. If you’re using cron and want your jobs to access files in your home directory, you must use kgetcred -r on each host where you’re going to use cron. See man kgetcred for more information.