You shouldn't need to. We will create an account for you when we receive the class lists for your first semester. This is generally toward the end of the first week of classes.
Your engineering email address is "username@engr.uky.edu", where "username" is the id you use to login to your engineering email account.
We can't tell you what your username is without knowing a bit more about you. You can find out for yourself, at our account information page.
The important bit is the "Student/Staff/Faculty Identification No.". This should be your UKID number, only without the initial "9" (if you're reading it off your UK ID card).
We probably haven't created your account yet.
If you registered early in the summer, you'll have to be patient. We don't find out about you until just before the semester starts; we'll create your account then.
If you registered after classes started, we haven't found out yet. We generally get updated class lists the second week of classes, so we'll probably create your account then.
If it's past the second week of classes, and you still don't have an account, come to our office (280 F. Paul Anderson Tower) and we'll create it for you then.
No, sorry. We're not yet equipped to allow you to do that.
Yes. You can even arrange to forward everything to one system, since it is often convenient to read all your mail in one place,
You can:
1) forward mail from your other address to your engineering email address. How you go about doing that depends greatly on what mail system is in use at your other address. It's probably safest to contact that system's administrator and ask them how to do it.
2) Forward mail from your engineering email account to your other email address. To forward mail from your engineering account, use ssh to connect to pop.engr.uky.edu and follow menu (Choice 2).
Note: If you opt to forward mail from us to some other system, please make sure that you stay under your quota on that system. Otherwise everything that gets sent to you just gets bounced back to the person who sent it.
But you don't have to forward anything anywhere. You can keep all your accounts separate. Just don't forget to check them all, especially if some of them have quotas.
Because we will. Any announcements or other important information from the Dean's Office, Student Support Services, your instructors, or other College groups will be sent to that address.
Your Engineering email account will stay active for one year past your last semester as an Engineering student.
You can also find this at our account information page.
If you've never changed it, it will be a lower-case "u", followed by a "$", followed by the last 6 digits of your UK ID number.
If you have changed it, we don't know what it is, but we can reset it for you.
Because there are people Out There who are trying to break into your account, and the password we initially give you is too easy for them to crack. Once they've gotten your password, they can do unspeakable things to our systems and to your account, and it looks like you are the one doing them, so you are the one who gets in trouble, not them.
In general, it's a good idea to change your password every couple of months. In practice, we don't make you do that. Just make sure your password isn't easy for anyone else to guess.
Have a look at our password guidelines page for some suggestions.
Log in to Engineering Webmail at http://mail.engr.uky.edu. On the left side of the window, there is a menu with "My Account" about mid-way down the list of options. Select that, then "Password". Enter your current password, then the new password, then the new password again, and select "Change Password".
(That actually submits a request to a program that changes your password, so you might have to wait up to an hour for the change to take effect.)
If you have forgotten your engineering password bring a picture ID to 280 F. Paul Anderson Tower and the administrators will reset your password to its original state.
You should then run, not walk, back to your computer and change your password again (see previous question).
The most convenient way for you will probably be to use our WebMail page.
If you prefer, you can use Outlook, Thunderbird, or any other POP3 or IMAP email client. The mail server, for both incoming and outgoing mail, is mail.engr.uky.edu. The mail server requires authentication and encryption for both incoming and outgoing connections (to ensure that your login name and password aren't intercepted); if your mail program makes a distinction between SSL and TLS, you'll probably want to enable SSL on incoming mail and TLS on outgoing. If your mail program doesn't make such a distinction (some older versions of Outlook, for example, didn't), you'll probably want to enable SSL on both connections. (Or consider upgrading to a newer mail client.)
POP is "Post Office Protocol". 3 is most likely a version number, we're not sure. IMAP is "Internet Message Access Protocol". POP mail clients download your messages from the server to your local computer, where you read, sort, delete, etc. them. IMAP clients let you do all the same things, but leaves everything on the server, without ever downloading them to your system.
One key point to remember about POP accounts is that most programs by default delete messages from the server after they're downloaded to your system (this can usually be changed in the settings, though). This, from our point of view, is the chief advantage of POP accounts - the server stays relatively clean, without tons of old messages hanging around. From your point of view, it can be either an advantage or a disadvantage: if there aren't tons of old messages hanging around in your account, you'll download the new ones a lot faster; however, if you tend to check your e-mail from several different computers, and all of your computers are set up to access your mail via POP, you'll end up with your mail spread over all of those computers.
IMAP, on the other hand, just leaves everything on the server, so you always have all of your mail regardless of where you're checking from. Therefore it is very easy for your mailbox, especially if you get a lot of mail, to grow very large. Practically, if your mailbox gets to be more than 100-200 MB in size, checking for new mail can get to be a problem. For this reason, if you choose to read your mail as an IMAP account, please use folders to sort your old messages.
Many mail programs can be set up to work as either POP or IMAP clients.
Nothing.
pine will occasionally tell you "Mailbox vulnerable - directory must have 1777 protection". This means that pine wants the mail directory to have "1777" permissions - the "777" means that anyone can read or write to the directory; the initial "1" means that only the owner of a particular file can affect that file. Taken together, "1777" means that the mail program can deliver mail to you, you can read your mail, but nobody else can.
We have a slightly different setup that uses different permissions but does exactly the same thing - the mail program can deliver your mail, you can read it, but nobody else can.
So you can safely ignore this warning message.
ssh is "Secure Shell", a program that lets you log in to computers remotely, from other computers. It's a lot like telnet, which you might also have heard about, only it wraps all your communications in a layer of encryption, so it's harder for someone listening on the network to figure out what you're sending.
It's not perfect, and there are ways of breaking or intercepting ssh transmissions, too, but it's a lot better than plain telnet.
ssh is installed already on all of our UNIX systems. To use it, just type "ssh remote.system" at the prompt. (Use the real name of the remote.system, of course.) If your username is different on the remote system, you can type "ssh -l username remote.system" instead.
For Windows users, we have a couple of ssh clients available on our launchpad, on the software page. Download both "puTTY" and "WinSCP", they'll both be useful.
puTTY is a zipped package of executable files, so you should be able to just unzip it and use putty.exe. You may want to put them all in a folder called "Putty", or some such, and make a shortcut from there to the desktop for putty.exe. (Or you may not.) You probably won't need the other files in the archive, but we include them just in case.
WinSCP is a single executable file, so you can just save it and use it.
Another neat package you may want to check out is "Cygwin". It's basically a set of programs that emulate a Unix environment on a Windows system, including the X11R6 server that lets you open windows and run things like xansys or Matlab remotely, but display graphical output on your own computer. For information about it, have a look at Cygwin/X's home page; for help installing it, come see us at 280 F. Paul Anderson Tower.
Cygwin has support for both SSH and SCP built-in, but they're UNIX-like (command-line) programs, so you may want to get one of the graphical SCP programs too.
It's a more-secure replacement for Windows FTP, the same way puTTY's a more-secure replacement for telnet. WinSCP uses "scp", a command-line scp (Secure Copy) client, but wraps it in a graphical user interface that's a lot like Ipswich's WS-FTP.
You can find out more about putty at the PuTTY home page, WinSCP at the WinSCP page, and FileZilla at SourceForge.
You can find more information about using WinSCP or FileZilla here.
Log in to your Engineering e-mail and select "My Account" from the menu on the left. One of the options should be "Activate UNIX account". Choose that, and we'll take care of the rest.
Notice: since the previous paragraph isn't always true, you may want to just send e-mail to help@engr.uky.edu asking for a UNIX account. Use your Engineering e-mail account to send that message, please, so we know who's asking.
UNIX is an operating system that developed on mainframe computers, beginning in the late 1960's. It is very good at doing many things at once, and so is popular in environments (like universities and research laboratories) where many people need to be working on the same computer at the same time.
For a more detailed answer, find one of the UNIX history sites on the Web, such as this one.
Our UNIX workstations are:
hornet is an HP system running HP-UX, HP's version of UNIX. fulcrum is a Sun system, running Solaris. moth, skyhawk and seahawk run one or another flavour of Linux, subject to change at our administrators' whim. For more details on these systems, check out our system resources page.
There are many applications available on the engineering UNIX servers: ANSYS, MATLAB, Maple V, Tecplot, Pro/Engineer, NASTRAN and Sysnoise. To find out which servers these application are on, check our system resources page or come to our office at 280 FPAT and ask us.
None. Applications such as Matlab, Ansys, etc. can only be installed on University-owned Faculty and Staff computers or laptops. This is because of the limited number of licenses that the College of Engineering has for these applications. Students who are current can download and install Windows software from their MSDNAA account or from the download.uky.edu website.
You can access your UNIX account from any of the campus computer labs. You can even access it from home if you use ssh.
To find out where the Microlabs are, check out the SCS homepage.
Your UNIX account is the same as your email account, so you change your password same way: login to your email account and choose the appropriate menu option.
By using it. It really is the best way.
Some of the more important commands to know are "ls" (list the files in a directory), "cp" (copy, requires two arguments - the 'copy from' filename and the 'where to put it' filename), "rm" (remove; deletes the file), "cd" (change directory), and "man" ('manual', the built-in online help system; "man command" will show you the manual pages for whatever command you type; "man man" will teach you how to use "man").
There are a few more detailed resources scattered about the Web, if you'd like to do a bit of reading about it. One good place to start is the Unix Guru Universe, which has a good collection of links to introductory essays, and a searchable database so you can find help on a particular command quickly.
We can create an account for you on our web server, www.engr.uky.edu. To get one, send an e-mail to help@engr.uky.edu from your Engineering mail account asking for a web account.
If what you meant was "How do I write my own web page?", then you're pretty much on your own. You'll either need to learn HTML, or invest in one of several programs that do the HTML for you, such as MacroMedia's DreamWeaver.
Link Blue and myuk accounts are not maintained by the College of Engineering. You should contact the UK IT department for such requests. You can also visit the customer help desk in person at 111 McVey Hall.
Supercomputers are maintained by the UK IT department too. You can request an account by going to their account request page.
Send email to help@engr.uky.edu or fill out our form at http://www.engr.uky.edu/helpdesk. We'll respond as quickly as we're able to.