connecting to the cs machines from a remote machine

If you want to connect to the CS machines from your dorm room or home, you will need the ssh program (i.e., an ssh client) on your machine. Ssh stands for Secure Shell. It is considered secure because all communications done through ssh are encrypted. This means anyone monitoring the network traffic (i.e., sniffing) will only see unreadable text going by, and not what you are actually typing (like your password).

If you want to transfer files to or from the CS machines, you will need either scp or sftp, which are secure versions of the copy (cp) and file transfer (ftp) programs.

If you're running Mac OSX, here's a nice page Rich created about using ssh and X11 to connect to the CS machines.

If you don't already have an ssh, scp , or sftp client on your machine (Linux and Mac OSX machines should have ssh and scp), you can try one of the following sites, based on what type of machine you have:

If you are trying to run xwin32 , which allows you to run Xwindows on your PC, and display X applications (like netscape) running on the CS machines back to your PC, you will need to use ssh to tunnel the X traffic back to your PC. Some hints on how to do this are here.

Here is an example of connecting to the SCCS (merlin) from the CS machines (allspice): 

   ALLSPICE% ssh merlin.sccs.swarthmore.edu
   Host key not found from the list of known hosts.
   Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)? yes
   Host 'merlin.sccs.swarthmore.edu' added to the list of known hosts.
   user@merlin.sccs.swarthmore.edu's password: 
   Last login: Tue Sep  7 09:34:01 1999 from allspice.cs.swarthmore.edu
   merlin%

In this example, the user is connecting to the SCCS for the very first time from allspice, and so is asked if merlin's host key should be added to a list of known hosts (~/.ssh/known_hosts). After it is added to the list of known hosts, this question will not be asked again unless the key changes (if it does change, you should check with the SCCS to make sure it is still correct!).

Here is an example of using scp on merlin to transfer a file from the CS machines back to merlin. 

   merlin% scp user@cs.swarthmore.edu:README .
   user@cs.swarthmore.edu's password: 
   README        100% |*****************************| 13027     00:01    
   merlin%

In this example, the README file is in /home/user on the CS machines. The dot (period) at the end of the command line means "give the file the same name on merlin, and place it in the current directory". Also, if your username is different on the SCCS and CS machines, you must use the user@ notation. If they are the same, you can just use "scp cs.swarthmore.edu:file ."

If you have problems getting these programs to work, please let us know at ().