Contents:

• Why a Organizational Account?
• What is an Organizational Account?
• Using the Organizational Account
• Adding or Dropping Access to an Organizational account
• Getting the Organizational Account's E-Mail
• Transferring Files to an Organizational Account
• Submit a Request for an Organizational Account
• Need Help?

Note: This page is for users who have an intermediate level of experience in using their UNIX account, an ftp program and web authoring. If you don't feel comfortable using the instructions on this page, ask someone with experience in your organization to help you or call the OIT/NBCS Help Desk at (732) 445-HELP (732-445-4357) for help.

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Why a Organizational Account?

With the growing popularity of the World-Wide Web has come a growth in requests for accounts for organizations. Students are increasingly seeking to move organizational services, such as web pages and e-mail addresses, off of their personal accounts.

Computing Services has received requests for "organizational" accounts almost as long as there have been computer accounts. In the past, these accounts proved to cause security and administrative problems, as people routinely shared passwords for the accounts, making it difficult to tell who was using the account at a given time.

We've come up with a solution that gives organizations the flexibility they want and gives us the accountability we need: the organizational account.

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What Is an Organizational Account?

We can create a special account on Eden (formerly known as a "become" account because of the now-defunct program once used to access it). This account has no password of its own. Therefore, it cannot be logged into by just anyone; only authorized Eden people can access that account. Consequently, anyone who is going to have access to the organizational account must have a personal Eden account. This means that faculty/staff who are not also in the students database will not be able to work on this account, unless they obtain a guest account on Eden.

See the section Submit a Request for an Organizational Account for instructions on how to request a organizational account.

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Using the Organizational Account

To log into an organizational account, you must SSH into the organizational account's e-mail address. (See the NBCS SSH page if you don't know how to use SSH.) For example, the help@eden address is an organizational account. To use it, authorized people type:

ssh help@eden.rutgers.edu

When asked for a password, give it in the form of

your_username:your_eden_password

Once someone has logged into the organizational account, they can do anything with it that was possible with the usual Eden account: send e-mail, create web pages, etc. People can send e-mail to the account's address, which is then kept separately from any mail sent to the authorized user's personal account.

Moreover, if more than one person is authorized to use the account, more than one person can log into the account at the same time. This both makes some tasks easier and creates problems. For example, those who share access to an organizational account must take care that two or more people don't try to write to a file at the same time. (The RCS (Revision Control System), a program that manages multiple revisions of files, is available on all OIT central systems. Type man rcsintro at your system prompt for further information and instructions. - ed.)

When they are through, they type

logout

and are logged out of Eden.

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Adding or Dropping Access to an Organizational Account

Before people can be added to an organizational account, they must have their own personal accounts on Eden. If they are students on the New Brunswick campuses, they can use the normal account creation process ( https://www.eden.rutgers.edu/rats/rats.cgi ). Faculty and staff who should have access to the organizational account will need to first request a guest account on Eden via the web form http://www.nbcs.rutgers.edu/ic/icforms/edenguest.html.

Only the "administrator" of the organizational account can add someone to, or delete someone from, the access list to an organizational account. The "administrator" is usually someone in the College activity funding board office. For further information, please see the following document: http://oit.rutgers.edu/services/account/nb_student_orgs.html.

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Getting the Organizational Account's E-Mail

If you're using an Eden-based mail program, such as pine, you can also use it as the organizational account.

If you're using a desktop-based mail program, such as Netscape Mail or Outlook Express, you get the organizational account mail just as you would with a valid personal account. For example, for jqsmith to get mail from the organizational account help (assume that jqsmith is authorized to access help and has the password Abc123), jqsmith would use

help

as the username and

jqsmith:Abc123

as the password. (Depending on which mail reader you have, you may have to put this username in a couple of different places; check the documentation for your specific mail reader. For information on configuring Windows-based mail readers, consult the NBCS documents, http://www.nbcs.rutgers.edu/newdocs/windows.index.html.) This will cause the mail reader to get the mail from the help account, rather than the jqsmith account, but it uses the jqsmith account to prove they can have access to the help account's mail.

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Transferring Files to an Organizational Account

You can a secure FTP program (sftp) to upload files to organizational accounts just as you would to personal accounts. However, you first have to set the accounts up so that you can do this.

If you want to move files from a desktop computer into a organizational account, you should do the following to set things up:

1. We'll assume you want to transfer web pages, since that's the most commonly requested use with an organizational account.
2. Log onto the Eden organizational account, as above.
3. Make sure you already have a public_html subdirectory. If you do not, follow the directions at http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/instructions.html to set one up.
4. Give the command
   chgrp orgacct public_html
   replacing orgacct with your actual organizational account name.
5. Give the command
   chmod g+rwxs public_html
6. If you already have files in that subdirectory and want to be able to copy them back to your desktop machine, give the command
   chmod g+rw public_html
7. You can now logout.

That will set up the account so that people who can log into it will also be able to sftp files there.

Now, whenever you want to sftp a file there, log in through the sftp program just as you would through the SSH program.

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Submit a Request for a Organizational Account

To request a organizational account, the organization or project head, organization chair, director, or other appropriately responsible person contacts the sponsoring organization about getting an organizational account set up. For further information, please see http://oit.rutgers.edu/services/account/nb_student_orgs.html. The application form is available at: http://rcsfao.rutgers.edu/whatisoa.htm.

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Need Help for EDEN Accounts?

Mail any additional questions and inquiries about EDEN accounts to help@eden.

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