Basic Course Account Setup

Initial Account Creation

Initial access and testing accounts

The person requesting creation of the course should be in the .rhosts of the account for convenient access. There should also be an entry in this file for isg@cpu102, so that the Instructional Support Coordinators have indirect access in the rare event a need arises.

For RST-based courses, there should be a course account group (typically named the same as the course account), and both a testing-account and a corresponding group that both the testing account and course account belong to (typically both account and group are called cs_XXX_-t, but this is configurable in the course's .rstrc directory). The cs_XXX_ account should also be in the .rhosts file of cs_XXX_-t so it can make testing connections easily. This can be set up by CSCF by contacting the accounts@cs e-mail address.

For Marmoset courses, the account must be named cs_XXX_t, because sudo is used instead of rsh, and this command forbids hyphens in accounts.

Login control

Serious consideration should be given to making sure that your course utilizes the ISGLoginScript.

Per-Term Course Staff Access

Care should be taken to ensure that all access permissions for all people who will no longer be affiliated with the course are removed in subsequent terms.

Course Group

Access to accounts through Finder on the Mac systems is determined by membership in the course group. accounts@cs can be contacted to add any missing course staff.

RSH Access

Note that this method is being phased out; it works on the legacy cpu-solaris.student.cs systems, but not on linux.student.cs. The entries in the course account's .rhosts file should be of the form localhost userid.

SSH Access

To access the course account through terminal, you will first need to follow the instructions below add an RSA key pair to the course account. Once that is complete, you can log in using the command ssh username@linux.student.cs.uwaterloo.ca. To log into the course account, username will be the course number, such as cs116; you can also log into your personal computing account by using your Quest username. Depending on where you log in from, the portion after the @ symbol can be shortened; for example, if you are working from a computer on campus, the .uwaterloo.ca portion is unnecessary.

(The following instructions are based on the "Creating and Copying Your Key-Pair in OpenSSH" section of this webpage: https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/cscf/howto/ssh/public_key/)

As a new tutor, to access the course account through the terminal, you will first need to add an RSA key pair to the course account. If you are using a school mac and are logged in, open terminal. If you are using your own laptop, open terminal and log into your personal account using ssh userid@linux.student.cs.uwaterloo.ca (the .uwaterloo.ca is only necessary if you are , and run the command ssh-keygen -b 2048 -t rsa. You will be prompted to enter a password; pressing return immediately will leave the password blank, which is generally fine. Navigate into the hidden directory .ssh (inside the root directory of your user account), and copy the contents of the file id_rsa.pub into /u/cs116/.ssh/authorized_keys on a new line. You will not be able to do this yourself, since you don't have permission to edit files on the course account (that's the whole point of this, after all). The easiest method is to email the contents of id_rsa.pub to an ISA who already has access to the course account, and have them copy it into authorized_keys. Once this process is complete, you should have access to the course account via terminal using the ssh command described above.