Changes to the Departmental (Become) Account Username/Password Format

On October 1st, an announcement was sent to all departmental accounts. After October 15, 2002, departmental ("become") accounts on NBCS systems (Eden, RCI, and NBCS/toolbox) must be accessed from desktop computer programs by
  1. giving only the departmental account as the username, and
  2. including the authorized username in the password area, separated from the authorized user's password by a colon (:).
Similar accounts on Eden and NBCS/toolbox were changed to this new method earlier this year.

For example, to access an RCI account called deptacct, an authorized person with the e-mail address of user@rci.rutgers.edu and a password of 1234Abcd would use

deptacct
as the username, and
user:1234Abcd
as the password. Of course, you replace deptacct with the actual departmental account name, user with your username, and 1234Abcd with your password.
 

This applies only to e-mail programs on RCI for now.  On November 5th, this will also apply to FTP (file transfer) and SSH clients as well. Eden and NBCS currently require this new method for FTP and SSH.  For an SSH command from a Unix system, type

ssh deptacct@rci.rutgers.edu
replacing deptacct with the actual departmental account name, to get into the departmental account instead of your personal account. Provide the password in the user:1234Abcd form above.

The become command on RCI will be changed to point to this web page.

We have made this change to make updating software simpler.  Previously, every time a piece of software is updated, we first had to edit its code to get it to recognize the old "deptacct/user" format. We've now moved the code that recognizes this format to a centrally located program called PAM (Pluggable Authentication Module). However, PAM does not permit a username long enough to accomodate the longest possible "deptacct/user" combination, whereas it has no limits on password length, so we had to move the authorized username to the password field.
If you have program profiles that use the old "deptacct/user" format, and that remember passwords, be sure to change them the morning of October 15th.

Please contact help@rci, or call the Help Desk at 732-445-HELP, if you have any questions.