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If you have not yet changed the initial password on your account, you should do so now. (On the Department of Mathematics calclab system, however, the system administrators may have disabled the password changing utility in order to save themselves the trouble of rescuing undergraduates who change their passwords and then forget the new passwords.) There may be a program on the "Utilities" menu to help you change your password; if not, then you can run the "yppasswd" command in a terminal window.
You should choose a new password that is easy for you to remember, but that is hard for another person (or a computer program) to guess. Therefore, your password should not be a word and should not be closely related to a word. For example, "calculu2" and "suluclac" are bad passwords.
A good password should normally be eight characters long and should contain a mix of numerals and lowercase and uppercase letters. (Passwords longer than eight characters are usually accepted on Unix systems, but typically only the first eight characters are active.) Here are two examples of good passwords:
This comes from taking the initial letters of the sentence "We have nothing to fear but fear itself," changing one letter to a digit, and capitalizing a random letter.
This is two syllables extracted from the words "Diophantine approximation" and spliced together with a digit.
Of course, these particular examples are no longer good passwords since they have been published here.
The Math 696 course
pages were last modified April 5, 2005. | | | Passwords |