How do my friends connect to Unix servers?

While we already extend some of our services to Carlson School, College of Education & Human Development, and College of Design, other members of the University community require a sponsor to gain access. For example, a CLA faculty member needs graduate students from the College of Science and Engineering (CSE) to access our resources to facilitate a collaboration. Once accounts are enabled the CLA faculty member and CSE grads can store shared documents and data, write and run programs together, etc.

If you are working with colleagues from external institutions they'll need to get access to the U of M network and our systems in one of two ways:

• Sponsored Internet account. This is a University service that gets you a full-fledged U of M Internet account for your collaborators, at a cost of $96 per person per year. Sponsored account holders can log in to CLA's systems as well as use the University's Virtual Private Network (VPN), and make use of certain other University services.
• "Service" account. These are pseudo-Internet accounts that can be created for free, but they are limited to accessing CLA servers and nothing else. We set these accounts with strict deadlines because they are difficult to track and manage.

While sponsored accounts are our preferred solution, it may not be possible for every research project, with many external participants, to pay hundreds of dollars a year for access. As the University continues progress on the Shibboleth implementation, we will be able to provide people from external higher education institutions the ability to log in to U of M systems using accounts from their home institutions. We will let you know once this option becomes available so we can quickly replace existing sponsored and service accounts.