Boston University
Infomation for New Graduate Students

Get a BU ID card: http://www.bu.edu/terriercard/

Students can get the BU ID, known as a Terrier Card, Monday through Friday, 9:00am - 5:00pm from the Terrier Card Office, 775 Commonwealth Avenue, Student Lounge, Lower Level.  Note: The Terrier Card Office will not officially start issuing cards until August 30. If students would like to be issued a card before that date, they must see Jennifer Streubel in MCS 140F. She can produce a letter to carry over to the Terrier Card Office.

Get a BU computer account: http://www.bu.edu/computing/accounts/

Students can get a BU computer account at the Information Technology Office, 111 Cummington St, 1st floor. You must bring your BU ID, and your letter of acceptance into the CS program.

Get a CS account:

To get a CS account, bring your BU ID card to room 302 at 730 Commonwealth Ave (the ugrad lab) and speak with a Terminal Assistant.  CS accounts allow access to Linux and Windows workstations in the undergraduate labs and most offices, and remote access to csa2 and csa3, the department's main servers.

Access to CS research lab:

Access to the CS research lab is available to persons actively engaged in research in the CS Department. To gain access to the CS research lab, students must be sponsored by a faculty member.  The sponsoring faculty member will be responsible for allocating any needed equipment and for overseeing the student's use of lab resources.

The Computer Science Research Laboratory is on the 2nd floor of 111 Cummington Street. The main door of the lab is labeled MCS 205-218 and is across from the westmost staircase of 111 Cummington Street.  Cardkey access to the CS research lab is available to persons actively engaged in research in the CS Department. Your BU ID serves as your cardkey.

TFs and RAs automatically get cardkey access. Otherwise, you need to have a faculty sponsor and then ask Jennifer Streubel, in MCS 140F, to set up your BU ID card access to the research lab.

Web account: 

At the prompt on csa2.bu.edu, type in: web-ok

This will create a public_html directory in your home directory with the address http://cs-people.bu.edu/username

Accessing BU via Modem: http://www.bu.edu/computing/dialup/

Dialup access to your BU computer account is available (see above link for details).

Mail forwarding: 

Note that your BU cluster account <username>@bu.edu email is different from your CS cluster account <username>@cs.bu.edu.

It is suggested that you set up forwarding of email from your BU account to your CS account:

http://www.bu.edu/htbin/acsmail.pl/forward

You may access your mail by logging into csa2 or csa3 and running a command-line e-mail client such as mutt or pine.  A web mail system is also available at <http://cs-webmail.bu.edu/>.  The department also runs an IMAP server for retrieving mail (cs-imap.bu.edu) and an SMTP server for sending mail (cs-in-smtp-01.bu.edu).  Note that if you are attempting to use our SMTP server from off-campus, you will need a mail client that supports the SMTP-AUTH authentication mechanism.