IT Service

The math account will be created from the central account issued by the RRZ (central IT services). To use your account at our department (for example to login to our Linux systems our to use the department blog), you have to do a one-time registration at the Kerberos server of the math department:
Kerberos registration

Having set the math password (Kerberos) to the RRZ password once, it is now independent. You can change the math password here, possibly to the same password as your current RRZ password if desired:
Math password change (Kerberos)

Math services (math.uni-hamburg.de) use the math password usually together with your account name (in lower case letters!), for some specific systems (Matrix, Wolke) it is givenname.surname instead (the part of your email address in front of the @ sign).

The RRZ password will be used for central services such as email, STiNE, eduroam, and VPN, but also for Moodle by the MIN faculty.

The AFS is the network filesystem at the department of mathematics. You will find your home directory there as well as shared directories. The AFS can be accessed worldwide and especially at home on personal devices. Further information are on the AFS page and details at our ITwiki.

The Wolke (German for cloud) is based on Nextcloud to easily share files, also with external people, and can be used to extend your homepage with materials. Using the Nextcloud app, you may synchronize a local directory with the cloud. Among several other apps, the calendar is in wide use at our department, since it is independent of the kind of email service (Exchange or the student email).

The Matrix is a chat system, for which the communication of members of our department will never leave our servers. Using federation, you can still communicate with external Matrix users, for example from the physics department, but also worldwide, interchange with a central offering of our university is planned. Using end-to-end encryption, you can be sure that not even the people setting up the servers will be able to access your content.

We recommend using the Element desktop app or Element mobile app, but you have to be sure to specify the Matrix server matrix.math.uni-hamburg.de. Your login is givenname.surname (the part of your email addresse in front of the @ sign) together with the math password (Kerberos). With some restrictions, you may use the webclient in your browser instead (attention: keys can be lost if you delete cookies or browser data).

If you are using multiple devices, they will have to verify each other to be able to exchange end-to-end encryption keys. Moreover, you should use the key backup offered, since we cannot restore end-to-end keys ever (otherwise, it would not be end-to-end). You can specify a Security Phrase, to store a Security Key backup at the Matrix server securely. We recommend doing so.

Besides chat, the Matrix can be used for telephony, but we recommend BigBlueButton instead, especially for conferences with multiple participants. The exchange of large files puts too much of a burden on our servers, please, use Wolke (our Nextcloud) instead and just share links in your chat.

BigBlueButton is a video conferencing solution, which is hosted by the math department in cooperation with the physics department completely on our own servers. In contrast to other solutions, there will not be any drain of personal data to outside entities already at login. The conference can be used without installation of a client simply using your web browser, but usually Chrome or a modern version of Edge work better than Firefox or Safari. If you are invited to a conference, you do not need an account on the server. There are many features to work together, particularly in so called digital or hybrid teaching, such as a whiteboard, a common text document, breakout rooms for discussion in smaller groups, and so on. For big hybrid conferences, you may use multiple cameras connected to the same PC and you are flexible assigning the roles of moderator and presenter.

For employees and their guests, our department provides the CUPS print server cups.math.uni-hamburg.de to be used while connected directly to our department network (cable based). We name our printers according to kind (cl=color laser, l=laser) and room. This is a simple existing system providing an alternative to the central printing concept with multipurpose devices of our university using the Q-Pilot-Client and a CopyCard, which is given out by your team assistant and has to be connected to accounting by the management of the department.