Miscellaneous information on using your account on hven

• New 11/26/01: I now recommend using MacSSH as your Mac client, since it supports the SSH2 protocol, which is more secure than the SSH1 supported by Nifty Telnet SSH. It also supports some other nice SSH features, like port forwarding, so you could (for example) tunnel your VNC connection over SSH. For Windows, you might check out PuTTY, which also has SSH2 and port forwarding support.

• Telnet vs. ssh

  Because of potential security problems, incoming telnet connections are disabled. You should use SSH (Secure Shell) instead. It functions much the same as telnet, but with an encrypted connection. There are free SSH clients available, such as Nifty Telnet SSH for the Macintosh and TTSSH for Windows machines. (The above two links are the clients I use. If you don't like those, there are other Mac clients and other Windows clients.)

  A quick overview of installing and running TTSSH for Windows:

  1. Download Tera Term Pro.

  2. Unzip Tera Term Pro and run the Setup application to install it; make note of the folder in which it is installed (default is something like C:/Program Files/Ttermpro/).

  3. Download TTSSH.

  4. Unzip TTSSH in the same folder where you installed Tera Term Pro.

  5. Run the ttssh application in that folder (not the ttermpro application) and choose SSH (not Telnet) under the "Service" buttons. You can then connect to hven.swarthmore.edu using SSH.

• Setting up e-mail forwarding

  I strongly recommend that you either read your e-mail on hven or (probably) have it forwarded to another machine, so that I can send out any info related to hven to all users and they will receive it in a timely fashion.

  If you want your hven e-mail to be forwarded to another machine, create a file called ".qmail" in your home directory (e.g. /home/joe/.qmail, if your username is "joe"). In that file, put the following line:

  
         &me@myaddress.edu
         
         

  where of course you insert your own e-mail address. Be sure not to put a space between the & and the address. The safest thing to do is of course to test out your e-mail forwarding after you set it up to make sure it works.

  There are many other things you can do with the .qmail file to control how your incoming mail is handled. (Of course, this is moot if you're forwarding your mail elsewhere.) To see the details, type 'man dot-qmail' on hven or read the man page on-line.

  Note: If you type 'ls' in your home directory, you will not see this file in the resulting listing, since its name starts with a period. To see such files, use 'ls -a' instead.