EECS Account Policies

The EECS Infrastructure Development and Services Group (IDSG) provides accounts for general computing as well as research purposes to all EECS faculty, staff, and students under the sponsorship of faculty members. These accounts incur charges to the sponsoring faculty, as detailed on our Rates page.

Group Accounts / Shared Accounts

Most users who wish to share file access on departmental or research computers can use a combination of UNIX or Microsoft Windows group membership and permissions to control such access. This does not require the creation of an additional shared login. Please send email to the helpdesk (help@eecs) for help in establishing group file access or to create a new group.

IRIS must support the UC Berkeley Computer Use Policy which discourages the use of computer accounts that are shared by more than one user. This is especially important when the group of users is changeable and difficult to define. Such shared accounts pose a security risk for the members of that group as well as for the entire University computing community. Illicit access to such an account is more difficult to detect and to trace than for single-user accounts.

One Login per User

It is intended that each user in the EECS community should have a single computer account name (for login and email use) that is unique on all computers within the department. This benefits the user because computer access for the user can be added to any computers within the department, and email can be received and data can be shared, without risk of conflict with other users.

In order to achieve a “single login per user” policy, the account creation process involves two steps. The first one is to have an appropriate roster entry for the user, including information such as user’s affiliation to EECS, location and contact information, etc. The second part is to have a unique username and uid assigned to the user. Both of these are stored in relational databases, with web based secure front-ends hosted by The EECS Data Warehouse. The information stored in this database will also be propagated to other services used daily in EECS, such as LDAP, Active Directory, etc. At this time, EECS Data Warehouse (DW) allows trusted staff the ability to access/maintain/update the EECS UID database of login names and UNIX uids. Please contact help@eecs for further information.

Following the policy of one login per user, we allow one mail forwarding address per person, matching your login name. Please contact help@eecs for additions and updates to the IRIS User DataBase for email forwarding.

If @eecs email forwarding begins to bounce in a permanent way (such as “User unknown” or the remote mailserver no longer accepts any email for an extended period of time or the remote mailserver is removed from DNS), we reserve the right to end the courtesy of @eecs email forwarding immediately.

In cases where the remote mailserver is refusing to accept all messages being forwarded via @eecs email forwarding, we reserve the right to begin the graceful retirement of that IRIS email address and its @eecs email forwarding.

Users are encouraged to think of their email address as they do their phone number; it is unique to them and can be looked up in a phone book or other reference. The directory services for email include:

• the UCB EECS LDAP Directory Service
• the UCB EECS departmental on-line faculty and staff directory
• the UC Berkeley CalNet Directory Service contains records for all current faculty, staff, and students at U.C. Berkeley

Other Email Aliases

In addition to maintaining the EECS User DataBase for email forwarding for individual logins, help@eecs also maintains mail alias forwarding for aliases that are not logins. Typically, these aliases are for department-related mailing lists. The policy for these non-login name aliases are as follows:

• The alias should be UC or department related.
• The actual alias should be hosted elsewhere, such as on our maillist server or on bGroups. We will provide the forwards for the three aliases (list@eecs, list-request@eecs, owner-list@eecs).

Please send your requests for new email aliases or updates to already established aliases to help@eecs.