An increasing number of network resources are accessible using your UCInetID and password. This is a convenience analogous to a master key, but as with such a key, you want to be very careful to protect it.
You should plan to change your UCInetID password with some regularity, perhaps once a quarter. NACS’s tools for managing your UCInetID have been improved in several ways which will make UCInetIDs more secure, and help you manage your password.
Choosing a password can be a daunting task. You must choose one that no one can guess but you can remember! To make passwords more difficult to guess, the “rules” for a valid password include:
- Password must be between 6-8 characters.
- Password must contain at least one alpha character [a-z]. Note that passwords are case-sensitive – they can have both upper and lower case letters.
- Password must contain at least one non-alpha character, which is neither the first nor last character.
- Password can’t contain any part of your name, forward or reverse.
The most significant recent change to these rules is that all the standard printable non-alphabetic characters are allowed, and since using such characters makes a password harder to guess or crack, NACS encourages their use.
With a more obscure password, there is always the risk that you yourself will lose your password. NACS now allows you to select a secret “question and answer” that allows you to reset your UCInetID password.
More information about UCInetID passwords is available at http://www.nacs.uci.edu/ucinetid/password.html .
Help for activating or resetting your UCInetID password is at http://ucinetid1.nacs.uci.edu/activate/menu.html .