Using Instructional Accounts
Author: Sarah Kim

A. Obtaining an Instructional Account

Request an EECS instructional account here.

You should receive a login that looks like cs61b-***, where *** represents 2 or 3 letters, as well as a password. Memorize your login and hold on to your password for just a bit (you can change it below).

You should now be able to use the lab computers using your login and password.

B. Accessing Remotely

You may wish to access your instructional account remotely from a personal or non-lab computer (checking grades, for example). If you are using a lab computer for today, you can come back to this section later.

Use your Terminal (or Git Bash if you're using Windows) to access your class account remotely through the ssh command:

ssh cs61b-***@derby.cs.berkeley.edu

Replace *** with the letters from your login.

You may come across a message along the lines of

The authenticity of host 'derby.cs.berkeley.edu (128.32.42.40)' can't be established.

You may always ignore this message and type yes to proceed.

C. Registering & Updating Password

This section is done on the instructional account. If you are working on a lab computer, just login. If you are working from a personal computer, then ssh in as described in Accessing Remotely first.

Register for the course by typing this command into the terminal:

register

If nothing is outputted, that means you are already registered for the course and you can move on to the next step.

You can also change your password using:

ssh update

D. UNIX Commands

The lab computers run on the UNIX operating system. As such, you can use terminal commands to make changes to your directory and files. You will find that you can use most of these commands on your local computer as well. Familiarizing yourself with these commands are an important part of being a programmer; although we will not test you on this, these commands will make your life easier as you code. Below are some important ones that you may find useful in this course:

There are some other useful tricks when navigating on command line: