Computer Account and Electronic ID (EID)

Both staff and students are assigned computer accounts, either automatically or through application, for them to connect to the campus network, access electronic mail, log in university Portal or use other central computing facilities and services.

Use of Computer Account

All computer account owner and user must observe the rules as stipulated under the "Policies on Use of IT Services and Resources".

The account of a computer or a system is represented by a username and password pair. The username is used by a computer for identifying a user while he/she is on the network or on a computer. The password associated with a username is used by the computer hosting that computer account for verifying one’s identify which he/she claims to be. Whenever a service is provided by a computer, each user normally will need a username and a password on that computer in order to access that service. If services are provided across different computers, then each user using these services must have one username/password pair on each of these computers unless these computers could jointly agree to share the same username/password pair managed by an identity server. Thus, for simplicity and ease of remembering, usernames/passwords on different computers that are not managed by an identity server but are used by the same user are ALL set to his/her EID while ALL passwords associated with these usernames are initially set to be the same right after the user has accepted the offer. As such, EID and username are often being treated as the same thing but in fact its meaning can be the same or different depending on the context. For the same reason, the user may believe that there is only one computer account for accessing all services but in reality, due to technical or historical reasons, one or more computer accounts with the same username/password pairs may exist for the same user as explained above. In order to differentiate the EID and the computer account with its username as EID, we call the latter as EID-based computer account.

This document serves as a guideline on the provision of these EID-based computer accounts to a staff member or a student, and on what he/she can do with these accounts. This document also describes what other computer accounts a staff member or a student can have.

For details, please refer to the following links:

IT.ServiceDesk@cityu.edu.hk