- During the campus holiday closure, December 23 – January 2, the OIT Help Desk (824-2222) will remain available for urgent support issues, but with limited staffing and potentially longer resolution times.
- For those of you who may end up with new mobile devices (smart phones and tablets) following the holiday season, you may wish to coach gift-givers on the devices which will work well on campus, or review OIT’s mobile set-up documentation.
- You can save money when buying software. If there is an option to get the software by download (as opposed to buying physical media such as CDs), such purchases are not subject to sales tax.
UCInetID Password Management
Your UCInetID is your key to online services at the University of California, Irvine. Many online services, including SNAP, WebFiles, Webmail and OIT Mailbox Services, EEE, WebReg, and numerous others, require you to use your UCInetID and password in order to log in.
You should never share your password with anyone, or write it down anyplace it might be observed. So, what can you do in the event you forget your password?
OIT provides a self-help system for resetting a forgotten password and choosing a new password. (You may not choose a previously used password.)
To reset your password, go to the Activate web site and select “Reset my Forgotten Password” at the bottom. The reset page will begin by asking for your UCInetID, your birthdate, and the last four digits of your Social Security number.
This will then take you to a page where you will answer the question you selected at the time you last activated your UCInetID. Then choose a new password. If you are unable to supply the authentication information, OIT can reset your password. Call the Help Desk from a campus phone or visit our walk-in Help Desk in Aldrich 115 with photo ID.
Staff and faculty of the UCI Medical School need to work with the HAIS help desk (x43434 on campus or 714-456-3333 at the Medical Center) to change a UCInetID password.
More information on UCInetIDs and identity management can be found on the UCInetID FAQ.
In Brief September 2011
- As of Monday, August 29th, Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) to Windows Computers, Port 3389, has been blocked from off campus. You may still use Remote Desktop to connect to a campus system by first connecting to the Virtual Private Network (VPN) service.
- OIT has announced recommendations for smart phone users. Phones based on the Android and iPhone platforms will work best with campus network services.
- EEE publishes regular reports on campus use of their instructional technology tools. The spring 2011 report can be found here.
In Brief July 2011
- As of July 20, 2011, POP access to email will be granted on an opt-in basis only. If you are already using POP, you will not be affected by this change.
- Apple has released Mac OS X Lion. This is a significant change, and you should upgrade only after consulting with your local support.
- UCI is hosting DrupalCamp LA again this year on August 6 & 7. (Drupal is a Web content management system widely used at UCI.) You can register for this free event at the DrupalCamp LA web site.
Email Disk Management Tips
Many faculty and staff, especially those filling multiple roles, find their increasing use of email and email attachments makes it difficult to do University business and remain within their disk quota limits.
While the ideas below won’t apply to all people or all situations, being aware of these strategies should prove useful to many.
Empty your trash
Depending on the program you use to access your email, deleting messages may not actually get rid of them – they may accumulate in your Trash folder and take up space you could use more productively. If you have messages in your Trash folder, your email program will offer an option to empty it. Example: in Thunderbird, select “Empty Trash” from the File menu.
Check your drafts and sent-mail folders
There are many circumstances in which partially-written messages are saved to a “drafts” folder. You should check that folder periodically and delete messages that you no longer need.
Email programs save copies of every message you send. While many of these messages constitute an important record, it may prove worthwhile to discard messages beyond a certain age or with little long-term value.
Watch your spam
UCI gets a large volume of unwelcome commercial and malicious email and central UCI systems test and repel millions of messages a day. As a complement to this filter, each account has settings for spam (see My Email Options) which defines a threshold for considering a particular message to be spam, and may quarantine it for inspection and discard. If you have a spam folder, examine it and empty it regularly.
Ask for more space
If you have already checked that you haven’t lost space to spam and deleted mail, your University role may simply require more space than the default quota provides. Contact the OIT Help Desk (oit@uci.edu, x42222) to review your particular disk usage and quota options.
Partition your usage
If you have multiple University roles, consider directing email for each role to a separate account. Quotas are applied to accounts, not people, and this may provide all the additional space you need, or at least protect one account with modest use from the email associated with another. Group UCInetIDs are available for a small monthly fee which can be used (for example) as mailboxes for deans, directors, and chairs.
Use local storage
Most email programs offer the option of creating “local” folders – i.e., the ability to store email messages on the machine you are sitting at. The advantage of this is vastly increased storage, but it has the downside that email stored in local folders can not be accessed from other computers.
The most common phenomenon that creates large mail storage is email attachments. Messages, even those with HTML and a few images, take up little space. Large documents, high-resolution images, sound files and videos consume your mail storage when they’re associated with your email as attachments. Consider storing your attachment as a local file and deleting the email that carried it. If you want access to these documents from multiple computers, consider storing them on OIT’s Webfiles service.
OIT is ready to assist you in assessing your usage patterns and needs, and matching them to available options.