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Changing your password for Macintosh computers

Changing your password is something that can be done only in your UNIX account. The original password you received in your Welcome Letter is meant to be only temporary. We recommend strongly that you change it. Your password must be at least six characters long. It may be more than eight characters long, but anything past the eighth character is ignored. At least two of the first eight characters must be letters, and at least one must be a non-letter (a number, punctuation mark, etc.). Passwords are case sensitive, so if you use upper case, lower case, or mixed case to create the new password, then you must always enter it that way.

Accessing the UNIX shell to change the password

OS 9 and below

Before OS X, Macs did not automatically come with the software needed to connect to the BCPL UNIX host. You will probably need to download one from the Internet. There are many kinds of telnet programs available for free online. Try going to sites like http://www.download.com/ or http://www.macorchard.com/.

Once you have a telnet program installed, connect to the Internet and then open the telnet program. At some point, you will have to enter the server name, mail.bcpl.net. Sometimes this can be entered in a box that pops up when you open the telnet program, in some programs you will have to search for a place to put a server name.

A login: prompt should now appear. Type your username and then press Return.
A password: prompt will appear. Type your password and then press Return.
A menu will appear. Type 1 and then hit Return.
You are now logged into your UNIX shell.

OS X

OS X and above comes with a telnet program called Terminal. To use this program to access your UNIX shell account, do the following:

First, locate the Terminal application. It can normally be found by going into the Hard Drive, then Application, then Utilities.
Open Terminal.
At the prompt, type telnet mail.bcpl.net and then press Return on the keyboard.
A login: prompt should now appear. Type your username and then press Return.
A password: prompt will appear. Type your password and then press Return.
A menu will appear. Type 1 and then hit Return.
You are now logged into your UNIX shell.

Changing the Password from the UNIX Shell

At the $ prompt, type passwd and hit Return.

At the Enter login password prompt, type in your current password and hit Return on the keyboard.

At the New Password prompt, type your new password and hit Return.

You will be prompted to re-enter your new password again. Type it in again, and hit Return.

Note: If you make a mistake, tap Return until you are back to the $ prompt. At that point you can type passwd again to try again.