For use in this course, you have a second network login on our lab computers, and you have a virtual machine on one of the department's servers. Information about your account and your virtual machine should be stapled to this handout.
You are asked to do the setup described in this handout before the first lab on Monday, September 3.
The network accounts for students in this course have the names net1, net2, ..., net29. You can log in to the Linux lab computers using your assigned account. We will use these accounts for labs that use a program called Wireshark and that do distributed computing.
These accounts do not use the same file server as your regular account, and because of that they are less secure. And they will be deleted after the end of the semester.
Furthermore, the accounts do not use the same kind of authentication as your regular account. Because of this, you not be able to change the password.
Setup: The first time you log into an account using the GUI interface on a lab computer, the system does a lot of setup in your account. If everyone logs for the first time at the start of our first lab, the file server will probably slow down to a crawl.
So, please try to find a time to log in once before the first lab.
Some of the lab exercises for this course will require that you have "root access" on a server, meaning that you have complete administrative control. Since I'm not willing to give you root access on the lab computers, I have set up a virtual machine for each person in the class. This has the advantage that the virtual machine will be running continuously. However, it will only be accessible by IP address and only from on campus.
Currently the root password on every virtual machine is fred123.
It would be a good idea for you to log in and change the root password as soon as possible.
To change the password, use ssh to log into your assigned virtual machine:
ssh root@172.21.6.xx
where, of course, you should use your assigned IP address instead of "xx". You can use this command in a Terminal on any Mac or on one of the Linux lab computers. You can use in on Windows (or even a smartphone) if you have installed an ssh program.
After logging in as root with password fred123, change the root password using the command
passwd
You will have to type the old password and the new password twice. The computer will not show the passwords as you type them.
You might see a message that a system restart is required. It should be OK to reboot your computer using the command
reboot
After a minute or two, you should be able to log in again. (If that's not true, let me know!)