Administrative Access Certification

Why have a certification process?

Computers exist on campus to support the teaching, research and administrative missions of faculty, staff and graduate students. When computers aren’t working properly, you can lose access to your e-mail, your files, the Web, and even your printer: in other words, when computers aren’t working, in many cases, neither can you.

Having administrative access to your computer gives you the ability to install software and create additional accounts on your computer. Being an administrator on your computer makes you simultaneously a more powerful, and a more vulnerable, computer user. The certification process is focused on alerting you to steps you can take as an individual to make sure that the computing resources you use are available to you, and not compromised by lost files, viruses, software conflicts, or an unstable campus computing network. Some of these steps are relevant only to administrators, and some of them are relevant to everyone who uses a computer.

The certification process is not intended as an introduction to systems administration, although some basic principles of systems administration are touched upon.