Secure Shell Clients

Secure shell clients are software packages that allow users to establish text-only connections with remote UNIX servers. You must use UNIX commands at the command line prompt during such a session. Secure shell clients provide two-way authentication, meaning that the client and server authenticate to each other, so that each side can be sure they're communicating with the other. Secure shell clients also implement network traffic encryption, so that compromising data in motion is much more difficult.

To establish a secure shell client session with one of the UNIX servers at the University of Nevada, Reno (e.g. Twilight or Fallon), you should use a secure shell client, such as SSH Secure Shell, puTTY, or the Terminal program in Mac OS X. In fact, it is not possible to access Twilight without a secure client.

At the University, secure shell client sessions can be used to set an email forward, set a vacation message, check disk usage (quota), or to use the Pine email client.

Use instructions on the following pages for Windows PCs or Macs to download, configure, and initiatiate a session for various secure shell clients:

SSH & SFTP Clients for Windows PCs

SSH & SFTP Clients for Macs

Initiating an SSH Session

    1. Login: Type your username (email address before @ symbol) and press Enter.
    2. Password: Type your 6-8 character password and press Enter. It does not display on the screen, so type carefully.
    3. At the prompt, type vt100 and press Enter.
    4. Your quota information displays.
    5. When you see a prompt with the name of the machine you are logged into, you may submit a valid UNIX command.

Changing File Permissions

    1. Login to the Equinox or Fallon server using an SSH client.
    2. Type chdir (change directory command) to switch to appropriate directory.
      Examples:
      • Type cd public_html to change to Fallon webpage directory
      • Type cd /homepage/username to change to Equinox webpage directory, where username is your login name
      • Type chmod to change permissions, e.g., to make webpages available to general public, type chmod a+r filename