Using Your Computer Account in Room 403

Graduate students in Agricultural, Food, and Resource Economics (AFRE) are each assigned a Windows user name and password for use of the computers in Room 403. If you do not have one, inquire in Room 416 Agriculture Hall and ask for Linda Beck.

• Your user name will be the same as your MSUNet ID, and your initial password will be a slightly modified version of your PID (starting with a lowercase letter "a" and a hyphen, e.g. a-12345678).
• When you log on for the first time, you will be required to change the password. The ANR password requirements are:
  • The password must be at least 8 characters long.
  • It must contain a varied mixture of characters, including at least one character from three or more of the following four groups:
    • uppercase letters (A-Z)
    • lowercase letters (a-z)
    • numerals (0-9)
    • symbols (for instance, @, #, =, -, etc.)
  • It must not contain portions of your user name
  • The system remembers the last five passwords you have used, and does not let you re-use them.
• You will be required to change your password every 90 days.
• This account is for your use only. Do not give the user name and password to anyone else, and do not log on for anyone else and then let them use the computer.
• You will have a home folder on the network server, named the same as your user name. This is accessible in 403 as H:\. No other users of the room can access your home folder. (However, the Computer Service administrator account for the network has access to all folders, for system maintenance.)
• It is extremely important that you log off your private account when you are finished with the computer. If you do not, the next user will have access to your home folder, as well as your AFS space (if you had mapped it).
• Conversely, if you sit down to use a computer and someone has left it logged in, log them off and log on with your own user name before using it. If you don't, you will be denied access to your own files.
• Another folder, S:\public, is accessible to all users for certain special uses, and should not be used for any of your personal files. Do not store files directly in the \public folder; instead, be sure to create a subfolder in which to put them. Typical uses of the \public folder would be temporary storage of files you want to transfer to another student, or for files on which you want to collaborate with someone else. However, everything in that folder will be deleted at the end of each semester, so you must not use it for permanent storage.
• There will be a special user name set up each semester for the use of non-AFRE students who need to use the lab for an AFRE class. This user name will not have a private folder and will only have access to a sub-folder of S:\public, called, for example, S:\public\fall2006. As with the \public folder itself, do not store files directly in the \public\fall2006 folder; instead, be sure to create a subfolder in which to put them. This user name will be de-activated at the end of the semester, and the files will be deleted when S:\public is emptied.