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Logins are SSH only, no telnet, rlogin etc. See User Login.

Old News
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  • October 27, 1999,We have turned on a limited form of incoming ftp. It is meant as an alternative means for updating web pages, especially for those behind firewalls which would not allow incoming ftp connections. See the ftp section below for further details.
  • June 25, 1999, The "bad" disk magically reappeared after a power cycle, so everything should be up for the time being. -kby
  • In June 1998, the alumni systems had been shut down because of hacker activities. The systems needed to be completely reinstalled. Alumnae became such a popular place for hackers to attack other systems that it was a menace to the internet. New login passwords were generated and mailed. Account activation was also required.
  • If you did not receive your password, please send email to tracy@alumni.caltech.edu or call 626/395-8365. You should request activation only if you need to use a shell account. Please, do not send emails about this to help@alumni.caltech.edu.
  • When your account is reenabled, your old .login and .cshrc files will be renamed to old.login and old.cshrc (unless those already existed, in which case they will be saved under some other name). If you were using the standard .login and .cshrc before, you can just delete the old files. If you had customizations, you'll have to carry them across yourself.
  • Not everything was rebuilt--mostly things that would have presented a security risk (or that which was required to rebuild those things that were). Known working stuff would be gcc, perl, top, sendmail, ssh. If your favorite newreader, mail program, etc. doesn't work send mail to help@alumni.caltech.edu, but be aware that the rebuilding of those things will take more time, so please be patient.
  • The web server (www.alumni.caltech.edu) is running on the new system.
FTP
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  • There is no direct ftp into alumni. You can ftp with alumni acting as the client; you would need to run an ftp server on your local machine to do this. You can use NetPrezence on a Mac, for example.

  • FTP sends passwords in the clear, so the server part of FTP is not running on the alumni systems. However the client part is available. So you can log into alumni and get and put files using the ftp command. If you are on a system that allows FTP access, you are all set, as long as you don't mind everyone in the world seeing your password on that system and accept the risk of having your account there filled with porn or MP3s.

     
  • If you are on a PC or MAC, you can get a freeware/nagware/shareware FTP server. wftpd for Windows and netpresenz for the Mac are quite popular, work well, and come with instructions. Start them up on your home system, SSH into an alumni systems and use the ftp command there. Be careful, only run the server while you are moving files and limit the number of connections to 1.
     
  • If you are using TTSSH, it includes file transfer options so you don't need to use ftp.
     
  • But what if I can't live without my GUI FTP!
    • Ok, The FTP server actually -is- running on alumnus, but it only accepts connections from itself. If you have an SSH with port forwarding you can use it. You will need to read and understand the port forwarding instructions for your SSH. The idea is that you pick a port on your local system (your PC, for example) and specify the target system, which must be alumnus (not alumni, alumni.caltech.edu, alumnus.caltech.edu) and port, which is 21. You must also have a FTP client that will run in passive mode. Anarchie for Mac and WSFTP for Windows, for example. After setting up port forwarding, connect to alumnus.caltech.edu via SSH, and verify that port forwarding is set up. Next start up your FTP client, set passive mode (sometimes called PASV) and connect to your own system. 127.0.0.1 or localhost will often work, otherwise you will need to use the name or IP number of your system. Now you should be talking to FTP on alumnus, the password it wants is your SSH password. NOTE! Only the port 21 traffic is encrypted, which is where your password is sent. All data traffic (your files) are unencrypted in both directions, and are in public view.
       
  • There are a variety of ftp servers available for Windows systems. Do a search for 'ftp server' on, for example: http://www.shareware.com. Two that work well are wftpd and bisonftp. When setting up an ftp server on your PC check the security and logging options. You want to be as restrictive as you can so that your PC does not become a target. You want to turn off anonymous ftp, limit the number of incoming sessions to 1, and turn the server on only when you need to transfer files.
     
  • Do NOT use your alumni user name or password for an account on your PC ftp server. Remember that ftp file transfers are not encrypted and can be seen by anyone.
Retreiving Your Email
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  • Currently, the new system supports only APOP, a version of POP mail.
  • Eudora Lite (free from http://www.qualcomm.com) supports APOP on Windows, PCs and Macs. For those who need some assistance, Eudora Pro, with more features and support, is available there and at computer software stores. Recent versions of Netscape and Internet Explorer that we have seen do not support APOP. As far as we know, Outlook Express does not support APOP either.
  • The server name is apop-server.alumni.caltech.edu. Note that APOP passwords are not the same as login passwords and can`t be used to login.
  • You may change your password by using the popauth command on alumni.
  • If you have not used POP (pop-server.alumni.caltech.edu) mail before you should probably set the "keep mail on server" option until you are sure of things, but then you will want to either delete mail on the server when you have read it or set to have it deleted after, say, 7 days.
  • In Eudora Lite, dilbert's APOP account would be:

dilbert@apop-server.alumni.caltech.edu

and APOP needs to be checked as the authentication style in the checking mail dialog box.

  • Note that APOP users will not be able to directly send outgoing mail through an alumni system, instead you need to use your ISP's SMTP gateway. In Eudora you would specify your ISP's SMTP mail gateway as your SMTP server in the outgoing mail dialog box. By specifying your alumni address as the return address in that dialog, your email will appear to have been sent from the alumni systems and any reply will go there.
User Logins
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  • Logins are SSH only, no telnet, rlogin etc. See http://www.datafellows.com for a commercial version for various platforms. The commercial version comes with support. SSH is like telnet, but it encrypts data sent over the net. Since it is a munition, we can't distribute it from the alumni systems.
  • SSH for Unix may be downloaded from ftp://ftp.cs.hut.fi/pub/ssh/. The ssh 1.2.26 without rsaref is known to work with alumni. If you are on a multi-user Unix system with the wrong version of ssh, you can obtain and compile your own version of the client. It is normally installed suid root, but this is not necessary to use it with alumni.
  • You can start out using SSH with password authentication, but you should change to using RSA authentication as soon as you can.
  • When you log in to the alumni system via SSH, you will be able to use the usual mail apps (elm, pine) the same way as before. The news readers will work the same too.
  • You may change your login password with the passwd command.
.Forward File
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  • We can set up a .forward for you. Send email to help@alumni.caltech.edu with your alumni username and the address you want mail to be forwarded to. If you were dilbert@alumni and want mail forwarded to dogbert@big.com, you need to include lines like this in your message:

    Username: dilbert

    Forward to: dogbert@big.com

  • You will receive confirmation upon completion.
MISC.
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  • In an emergency we can send text files to you from your alumni account or replace files that you can send as text in email.

last update: March 16, 2001