SSH

Unix users, you may already have ssh and scp commands. To find out, get a shell in a window and tryssh -V If you have ssh, try ssh -h 2>&1 | more and scp -h 2>&1 | more

If you don't have them, you should get them, and stop using FTP and Telnet to talk to computers whose security you care about. The risk is greatest if you or the hosts you talk to are on a shared network segment with a lot of untrusted neighbors who can see every bit you send or receive. Once you've switched, you should change your passwords on those computers.

Examples of shared network segments: cable modem service, university campus network, untrusted co-location environment.

OpenSSH is free and easy to install. You may have to get some libraries (zlib, openssl, etc.) but they are probably already present on your Linux or FreeBSD host.

How to use them

Once you have scp, you can replace your personal home page on rachel by creating a new index.html file and going

scp -P 622 index.html  name@rachel.greens.org:.www
where name is your login name. The scp command on your system will prompt for your rachel password.

To get a shell on rachel, type

ssh  -p 622 name@rachel.greens.org