Grad Student Accounts

Here we discuss the various accounts Grad students may get, attempting to demonstrate what happens automatically, and what manual supplementary information may be required.

Required authorization

• Users who need to update accounts need to be in group "sponsor" and group "accounts" on cs-xh-admin.cs.private.uwaterloo.ca
  • That is, in those groups in the CS-GENERAL AD
• Users who need to manipulate accounts, for example set passwords, in the cs-general region to be in the "accounts" group on cs-general.cs.private. Similarly for any other region.

Location of Accounts Sponsor files

cd /software/accounts-master/data/sponsors

The uwuserid and student id number of all graduate students are automatically placed the files named cs8 (Masters) and cs9 (PhDs) beneath REGISTRAR/.DATA. This triggers the allocation of primary accounts for graduate students in the cs-general region.

Graduate students will receive other accounts in the student.cs region based on the similar appearance of their uwuserid and student id number in files corresponding to individual courses. For example, grad student identification might appear in a file cs798, or cs648, and occasionally even one such as cs350. For more details see UndergraduateAccounts since the sponsorship mechanism is similar in those cases.

In addition, supervisors often want to sponsor other accounts on their own research regions, and occasionally sponsor extra resources in the cs-general region. All such extra sponsorship requires manual configuration to supplement the automatic allocations. It is fairly common for supervisors to request sponsored (UNIX) group memberships for their students, to allow groups of their graduate students to share information with each other.

-- AdrianPepper - 2014-08-14