There's good news if you use an Internet Service Provider (ISP) to access
campus Web pages and newsgroups. With a new authentication service
developed by Information & Educational Technology, all faculty, students,
and staff can
dial in to information resources restricted to campus affiliates from any
off-campus location. This new service marks a substantial improvement
over the previous authentication method, which allowed access only if the
request came from a campus-based Internet Protocol (IP) address.
(Internet Service Providers assign their own IP addresses.)
Access to campus Internet resources is controlled in order to protect
copyright agreements, software licensing and distribution agreements,
intellectual property, and student privacy rights. The Melvyl database,
other specialized databases, class-related Web pages, site-licensed
software, restricted departmental services, and UCD newsgroups are some
examples of services that were previously inaccessible via a commercial
Internet Service Provider.
Web site managers on campus and at the UCD Medical Center may install the
new authentication service on their local Web servers, configuring each
server to restrict access to a specific set of files and directories.
This service takes advantage of elements of the distributed computing
infrastructure already in place on campus, including:
With these elements in place, your name and password will not be
transported in clear text across the network during the authentication
process.
Improved services also include authenticated access to news.ucdavis.edu,
the campus news server. To access newsgroups served by news.ucdavis.edu
through a commercial ISP, point your Web browser to
http://www.ucdavis.edu/authentication/news.html and follow the
authentication steps.
Service Description Overview
Authentication
Simply stated, authentication proves your identity, just as logging in to
your campus computer account with your user name and password verifies
your identity to a particular computer system. In this case,
authentication refers to providing your identity to the campus Kerberos
server. (Kerberos was conceived at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
as a secure way to allow users and services to authenticate themselves to
each other.) The name and password required in this case are your UCD
LoginID (or "new-style" LoginID) and your UCD Kerberos
password.
Improved Security
The new distributed authentication service can support more restricted
levels of access (which is particularly useful whenever security concerns
are high) and can be tailored to departmental needs.
Accessing Internet Resources
In order to read restricted Web pages or news services, you must first
prove your association with the campus by entering your UCD LoginID and
Kerberos password. (To find out about UCD LoginIDs and Kerberos
passwords, see Resources at the end of this article.) Once you have
proven your affiliation, you will be able to read any Web page secured
within the ucdavis.edu domain for the duration of your browser session.