LINUX ACCOUNT MANAGEMENT

OIT Linux Accounts

OIT provides personal and departmental user accounts on the Public Linux environment, which is a robust, full-stack LAMP service running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. After creating an account, UT students, staff, and faculty can build websites, compile programs, edit files, and more. These accounts may be subject to restrictions regarding the resources available and the features provided, and as such, may not be suitable for all cases. See Rules and Restrictions below.

Creating an Account

All Linux accounts are created with a unique NetID, which will be the name/owner of the Linux account. Do not create an account with a personal NetID if the intent is to create a departmental account. If you do not already have a suitable departmental NetID, you must request a departmental NetID before you can use this site to create a departmental Linux account.

Login to Create or Manage Account

Rules and Restrictions

Students, faculty, and staff are limited to one Linux account for personal use.
Faculty and staff may have additional accounts for departmental or research use.
Personal accounts should not be used for department or research purposes.
Do not use for non-University-related business.
Accounts are available for one year after you leave the university.
Do not store sensitive data (e.g., HIPAA, FERPA, PCI, etc.) or data needed by high-profile applications.
The available resources are shared by all users, as with all multi-user systems. OIT has placed reasonable user restrictions on those resources to foster a positive user experience. Periodically admins must take more severe actions to ensure the well-being of the majority.

Accessing Your Account

You can log in to the Linux server with any SSH client (e.g., PuTTY) or SFTP client (e.g., WinSCP, Cyberduck, or FileZilla) using the information below. Detailed instructions are available in an OIT Knowledge Base article.

Host: linux.oit.utk.edu
Port: 22 (SSH)
Username: netid
Password: your NetID password

Website Hosting

If you intend to use your user account as a web site, create a folder in your account named public_html and store your web content there. The folder and file permissions must be set to 755 to allow world read access to the content you wish to be visible on the site.

Personal Websites

Once you have created your website folder, your default public web URL will be in the following format:

http://volweb2.utk.edu/~netid

Departmental Websites

A department, faculty, or staff may request a vanity domain name for a site (e.g., http://netid.utk.edu), in lieu of using the above URL format. Subject to approval, any domain name ending with .utk.edu or .tennessee.edu may be used.

Creating a WordPress

You may install WordPress on either personal or departmental sites. Here are a few things to be aware of prior to installation:

Contact the OIT HelpDesk before installing WordPress to ensure the proper permissions are set.
Request your vanity URLs before installing WordPress (faculty, staff, or department only).
Request or setup a MySQL database.

OIT scans websites and automatically removes WordPress plugins that have been determined to negatively impact the performance, security, and/or reliability of the web server. See list of plugins that currently fall in this category.

Follow these steps for setting up WordPress on the Public Linux environment, or contact the OIT HelpDesk to set up a consultation.