How to change your password.

If you are using a secure browser

Go to Account Management Wizard. Login and select "Change Password(s)". If you're not using a SSL-enabled browser, follow the instructions below.

Log into your shell account

You must log into your shell account in order to change your password.

If you are using PPP to connect, you need a telnet program in order to log in. You can find a telnet program program for the Macintosh at http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Software/Brochure/MacSoftDesc.html. If you are using Windows 3.1 you can get a telnet program from http://www.vectorbd.com/bfd/winsock/qvtws398.zip. If you are using Windows95, then you already have a telnet program.

Telnet to idiom.com.

Use the passwd command

The command to change your password is: passwd.

Changing other information

You can change your other account information with the chfn command.

When you use chfn, it puts you in an editor. The default editor is vi. If you normally use pine and want to use it's pico editor instead, then use the following command to change your default editor:

echo setenv EDITOR /usr/local/bin/pico >> .cshrc
source .cshrc
If you mess up, you can get a new .cshrc file with:
cp /home/.cshrc ~

Changing the password for your PPP login or any POP-only accounts

Everyone has a PPP account. It is your login name with the First Letter Capitalized.

When you change your password, it changes only one password at a time. If you use passwd with no arguments, it changes your unix shell password only.

You must log into your shell account to change your PPP login password or any POP account passwords.

Your unix shell account is used for PPP login if you using PPP-based authentication to log in and your authentication user name is your unix user name.

To change your PPP password, use:

passwd Login
where Login is your login name with a First Capital Letter.

To change a POP-email account's password, use:

passwd poplogin
where poplogin is the POP-account name.

Choose a good password

Please choose a good password. Currently, someone trying to guess your password gets about 100 million tries. 100,000,000 is a lot larger than the number of words in all the dictionaries in the world. It's also larger than all the place names, person names, and cute phrases. Passwords must be eight characters long and have a high degree of resemblence to nonsense.

Please do not use personal information (name, cat's name, phone number, address, old address, etc) when creating your password. Base it on something random.

If you're having trouble making up a password, try making up a sentence and then using the first letter of each word in the sentence as your password.