Access to the ERAU/Prescott Unix Environment 

Topics on this page:

Accounts:
 

Students:  If you are a student here enrolled in a course involving Unix, your instructor may have already asked campus Information Technology  (hereinafter referred to as IT) to create a Unix account for you. If not, or if you don't know or remember your user account name or password, contact IT at extension 6990.  Your account name (also known as your user or login name) and your password give you access to sun (a.k.a. prclab), mercury, and possibly several other Unix machines on campus as well; but IT is moving to centralize student Unix computing to sun so most of the references on these web pages will be to sun.

• Faculty or staff:  If you're new faculty or staff, IT will create a Unix account for you upon request; call IT at 6990.

Access Methods:

• SSH is the program of choice here.

  
  
• Telnet and FTP connections to the general purpose campus Unix servers (sun/prclab and moon/mercury) are not available, not even from on campus. (Research projects and other users running dedicated servers not intended for general use may make their own arrangements with IT.) Use SSH for both command line and file transfer access the sun and mercury servers.
    
  
• Xwindows: sun (and probably most other Unix servers on campus, I haven't checked) hosts a reasonably standard X environment. Hummingbird, a Windows based X server, has been installed on the lab computers in KETC and possibly other locations throughout the campus as well. There's a partially complete "how to" web page for opening an X connection to sun via Hummingbird; contact IT for more information or assistance.

Connecting  from off campus:

• Via an Internet Service Provider (ISP)
    
  
  • The campus firewall won't accept incoming telnet requests, but passes SSH on port 22 (the standard SSH default).  There are a variety of freeware SSH clients available on the web. The commercial SSH client that is installed on all campus machines (for which I have prepared "how to" web pages) is available as a freeware download for university faculty, staff, and students to install on personal machines as well.
      
  • Connect to your ISP in your usual fashion. Once connected, use SSH as described above to connect to the campus Unix host you want. Since your ISP is in an off campus domain, remember to use the Unix host's  full name, e.g.,  sun.pr.erau.edu
      
    
  • If  the Unix host simply refuses the SSH connection (that will be the error message, "Connection refused", with no mention of a problem with your account name and/or password), your ISP may not be responding correctly to the campus host's request for reverse DNS authentication (a security measure for connections from off campus).  Some (most?) ISP servers respond correctly to that request; some, unfortunately, don't. I know that at one point a few years back, the servers from CableOne (which also provides dial-in ISP accounts within the Prescott area) didn't respond to such requests and, when we pointed this out, CableOne went to the trouble of fixing them to respond properly; I don't know about other ISP's.  If that's the problem, you'll have to contact your ISP; requiring reverse DNS authentication from the ISP is not something the university's IT types are willing to give up (and I tend to agree with them.)
      
    
• Via direct dial in:   Campus IT does not allow direct dial in to the campus network or Unix servers.   The assumption is that if you want access from home, you will purchase internet access via a commercial ISP connection and then run SSH for shell or file transfer access.