Chapter 2. Basic Client Use

2.1. A Running Example

Suppose you're out of town on a business trip and want to read your email, which sits on a Unix machine belonging to your ISP, shell.isp.com. A friend at a nearby university agrees to let you log into her Unix account on the machine local.university.edu, and then remotely log into yours. For the remote login you could use the telnet or rlogin programs, but as we've seen, this connection between the machines is insecure. (No doubt some subversive college student would grab your password and turn your account into a renegade web server for pirated software and Ani DiFranco MP3s.) Fortunately, both your friend's Unix machine and your ISP's have an SSH product installed.

In the example running through the chapter, we represent the shell prompt of the local machine, local.university.edu, as a dollar sign ($) and the prompt on shell.isp.com as shell.isp.com>.