ClassAccounts/Manage

Class Accounts are provided through our Nexus infrastructure with a specific partition of nodes. Each class will need to have the faculty member or TA(s) as the point of contacts for the class. All students within the class will need to raise issues or questions through these points of contact who can relay or request support through our HelpDesk. Please refer to the ClassAccounts documentation for further information.

Request New Class

If you are a faculty member teaching a class and want to use our resources, send email to staff@umiacs.umd.edu to create a ticket. Please list or CC your TA(s) and what course you are teaching. UMIACS staff will confirm the course through UMD Testudo and create the class within our Requests application. We will associate you and your TA(s) with the class to be able to manage it through this application. If your TAs do not have existing UMIACS accounts, please sponsor collaborator accounts for each of them.

Please also mention any special storage allocation(s) you may need in your request.

Once the class is created, you and your TAs may want to create class accounts for yourselves (which is allowed). This ensures you see the steps that students will see when getting their account(s) and give you the ability to test and manage any local resources for the class.

Management of Accounts

Once the class is created, accounts go through the following lifecycle.

• Faculty/TAs create requests in our Requests application with the class dashboard. This is done by entering a form with one or more email addresses. We only support creating accounts for @umd.edu and @terpmail.umd.edu addresses.
• Once a request for a student has been created from this email address, the student receives an email with a URL including a token that is only good for 7 days. Once they click this URL, they will be taken to a page to redeem their account by entering some information about themselves and selecting a password for their account.
  • If the student does not redeem their account, Faculty/TAs can go into the student's class account request in the app and renew their token. This will invalidate the old token and issue a new token and then send a new email for account redemption.
• Accounts that are redeemed will show up as pending in the Accounts Installed section of the class dashboard. UMIACS Technical Staff will install class accounts that have been redeemed once per business day. Once the account(s) are installed, they will be listed as installed on the class dashboard. Each student will receive an email with information on getting started with their class account.
  • Note that class accounts also need to setup Duo multi-factor authentication in order to access the cluster. Otherwise, they will see the message Access is not allowed because you are not enrolled in Duo. Please contact your organization's IT help desk. when trying to SSH to the class account login nodes. Have them follow the instructions here.
  • If a student does not provide a phone number when they redeem their account, they will not be able to reset their password automatically in the event that they forget it. In this case, the TA will need to contact staff and staff will advise on the steps.
• Faculty/TAs will need to communicate any special instructions or information with their students on how to use the computational resources.

Deletion of Class

We will notify and clean up all class accounts after each major semester's completion. Class accounts are liable to be archived and deleted as early as follows:

• Winter semesters: February 1st of same year
• Spring semesters: June 1st of same year
• Summer semesters: September 1st of same year
• Fall semesters: January 1st of next year