Desktop Services
Desktop Services accounts, passwords and security
Getting a Desktop Services account
Your Desktop Services account gives you access to all the DS services - filestore, Managed Clusters of computers, extensive software provision, printing facilities, and the facility to publish personal or group web pages. All students and many members of staff are given DS accounts automatically when they join the University, and will be given instructions on how to collect their login name and initial password. Any other member of the University may apply for a Desktop Services account.
Student accounts are normally cancelled at the end of the student's course, and staff or visitor accounts when the individual leaves the University. More details of the cancellation schedule are available:
Identifiers and passwords
When you receive details about your DS account, you will be told your user identifier (CRSid, which is the same as the identifier you use for Hermes mail) and your password (which is different from your Hermes password). You should first change your DS password to a more memorable string that is known only to you. The same password works for the PCs (Windows and Linux) and the Macintoshes, and for connecting remotely to the filestore or printers. DS passwords are case sensitive (so CASE is different from CaSe).
If you forget your password, please call into Computing Service Reception with some proof of identity between 9 am and 5 pm from Monday to Thursday (10 am and 5 pm on Wednesday), 9 am and 4.30 pm on Friday, or request a reset online and you will be issued with a new password.
Your password must never be given to another user. Anyone who knows your password can not only damage or destroy your files, and use your printing quota, but may send email in your name, use your account as a base for Internet hacking or dissemination of illegal material, and potentially cause damage far beyond your own account and your own files.
File access and security
The first and most important steps in keeping your files and your computer account safe are choosing a good password and keeping it secret.
It is your responsibility to backup your Desktop Services files. System backups are kept in case of hardware failure, but it is not normally possibly to restore individual files lost through user error.
By default nobody else (logged in under their own name) can read or do anything else to your DS-Filespace files. You can give permission for other users to read, modify or create files in your filespace.
If you fail to log out of Desktop Services when using a machine in a public room, then anyone can sit down at the machine you were using and do anything that you could do to your files. Similarly, anyone who obtains your password can pretend to be you and read or delete your files.
If you leave files on the hard disk (C: drive in Windows) of your Managed Cluster machine, then anyone coming after you can read them, and they are likely to be deleted anyway within a day or so, since the hard disks are regularly purged.
Last updated: September 2011