I received a mail from you asking for my account data including the password - is it genuine?

No. We will never ever ask you to tell us your password.

This mail is from someone trying to steal and abuse your account. This kind of attack is called phishing.

Can you change my login shell to bash ?

No, sorry.

The recommended login shell is zsh, and tcsh is available for those who really want it badly. Users with those login shells will find identical environments after they login. This is important to make documentation universally valid, for example. Unfortunately, bash is so limited in functionality regarding processing of startup files that this cannot be achieved, hence we can't provide it as a login shell. There are no other limitations to using bash - you're free to use it for scripts as well as interactively. Most users giving zsh a chance soon find that it's very similar to bash and has a number of useful additional features.

Why is my Unix home directory so small?

Because we make a distinction between home directories and other storage areas.

Your home directory is meant to be used for your most valuable and important personal files. Like source code you wrote yourself, the TeX source for your thesis, your presentation in tomorrow's seminar, and so on. And its availability and responsiveness is important to make any work you carry out on our systems possible and smooth. The only way to achieve this is to keep home directories sufficiently small. It would be no problem to provide home directories that are orders of magnitude larger, but chances are that every second new diploma student would start out filling it with bulk data and accessing that from hundreds of jobs on the compute farm in parallel eventually. The result would be a much less pleasant experience for any user sharing the same fileserver.

All groups have significantly more disk storage available - on independent servers dedicated to the group. Please contact your group admin (or supervisor, if applicable) if you need to store and process bulk data.

Your home directory quota can be increased to a reasonable amount on request if it is too small to accommodate your files that should be stored there. Please contact uco.