Login
Welcome to the ECS/SMS websites
By logging in to our website you will be able to access protected resources and some areas of the website will be personalised.
Help
There are several reasons that you may be unable to log in:
Selecting the wrong "Domain"
Our login system tries to cope with the wrong domain being selected (eg: logging in with your VUW student username/password with Domain set to ECS). But this may not always work reliably. So if your login repeatedly fails you should select the right domain for the username/password that you are using (ECS, VUW student, or VUW staff) and try again.
Forgotten password
If you have forgotten your ECS password, please visit the "Forgot your password" page to find out how to reset it. If you have forgotten your VUW student password you can go to the VUW student password reset page.
You haven't performed "Account Registration"
Before you log on using your ECS username/password for the first time you need to set your ECS password via our account registration system. Remember, an ECS login is different to other computer logins you use elsewhere in the university and can have a different password.
To register your ECS account, please go to one of the computer labs in the school, or you can register online.
Account registration is NOT required when logging on using a VUW student or VUW staff username/password.
Cookie problems
Our website follows industry best-practice and uses an encrypted session cookie to authenticate your requests to our server. This cookie is not written to your hard disk.
If your browser blocks cookies, then your login may succeed but subsequent requests to our webserver may be denied. Please allow your browser to accept session cookies. If necessary you can add ecs.wgtn.ac.nz to the list of trusted sites in your browser options.
IP Address mismatch
Our webserver checks your IP address when checking whether you have logged in. Depending on how your ISP or employer is connected to the Internet requests to our web site may appear to come from multiple different IP addresses. In this case you will be prompted to log in each time a different address is used.
To find out if you are encountering this issue you can compare the results of visiting this link a few times. If it displays different addresses we unfortunately can't do anything to help you. Hopefully you will only need to log in a few times before the possible IP address have all been used. Then you shouldn't need to log in again during that browser session.
Kerberos authentication
A web browser that supports Kerberos can log you in automatically if you are within the ECS environment. Currently common browsers such as Konqueror, Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer have support for Kerberos.
To tell your browser to prefer Kerberos over password authentication, you can set a cookie: Prefer Kerberos authentication; Prefer password authentication.
A browser with Kerberos support may still fail to log you in to our web site automatically. One reason may be if your Kerberos "ticket" has expired because you've been logged in to your desktop computer for more than 10 hours. For our Linux systems typing "kinit" at shell prompt or locking and unlocking your screen will give you a fresh ticket.
Popup authentication boxes
If you are using Internet Explorer, you may be hitting an IE bug that pops up an authentication dialog if Kerberos authentication fails. To avoid this happening again, you can set a cookie to use password authentication in preference to Kerberos.
Requesting help
As usual, if you have trouble logging in you can contact the ECS Tech Staff by email, giving as much information as possible: bugs@ecs.vuw.ac.nz.