Telnet Information A Telnet account is included with all Domain Virtual Accounts. It is not included with Non-Domain Accounts. Please Note* many providers do not permit telnet access as it often becomes a security risk and is often misused. We are providing telnet accounts for the convenience of our customers so they need not come to us everytime a permission on a file needs to be changed, and so forth. Bear in mind, that your CONTOL PANEL will provide all or most of the file managing/editing capabilities you will probably ever need. Use it! A telnet account on our system is not a license to use our machines as your personal pc. Please do not treat it as such. Login, do your work and logout. People abusing the telnet facilities are subject to having their telnet privileges terminated. Any improper use of your telnet account to attempt to gain unauthorized access to our system files or other users' directory files will result in IMMEDIATE termination of your server account without refund! Whether or not you need a telnet account depends on: If you plan to do much CGI programming or modification. Do you prefer to get your mail using a mailer like Pine? Do you prefer to construct your site using Telnet? Are you familiar with Telnet and Unix commands? If you answered 'Yes' to a majority of these questions, then you probably need it. Keep in mind, most site contruction and modification can be done using FTP. The difference is in doing things locally on your hard-drive, sending the HTML and graphics to your Webspace, and replacing them with updates as needed. With Telnet you have the ability to do changes in 'real-time'. In fact, there is very little site construction you cannot do with FTP so remember, you can always user your telnet account at a later time if you don't need it right now. Basic UNIX Commands O.K. You've telnetted in and would like to know a few commands? Well, you would be better off buying the book "Teach Yourself UNIX in a Week" published by SAMS, or UNIX for Dummies. But since you insist, described are some basic UNIX commands. You will find them quite similar to IBM DOS. If your account is a domain account you will land in your /usr/home/your-id directory. This is not the same as your /www/htdocs/yourdomain directory where your WWW documents will be kept and where you land when you FTP into the system. The /usr/home/you is where your administrative files such as your mail redirect file are kept. Change directory to /www/htdocs/yourdomain to work on your web documents. cd /www/htdocs/yourdomain mv mv fred wilma This moves fred to a file named wilma. Similar to renaming it. mv fred flintstones/fred This moves fred to a file named fred in the subdirectory flintstones. mkdir mkdir flintstones This makes a subdirectory named flintstones. cp cp fred wilma This copies fred to a file named wilma. cp fred flintstones/fred This copies fred to a file named fred in the subdirectory flintstones. rm rm flintstones This removes a file named flintstones. rm -rf flintstones This removes a directory named flintstones. The -r removes the directory, the -f forces it to remove files without asking you before it deletes each one. cd "cd flintstones" This changes the directory to the subdirectory named flintstones. "cd /home/flintstones" This changes the directory to the home directory of the flintstones. "cd ~flintstones" Also changes the directory to the home directoy of the flintstones. "cd /www/htdocs/flintstones" This changes the directory to the web directory of the flintstones. "cd -" This is a short cut to put you in the last directory you were in. ls "ls g*.*" will bring up all files that begin with g and have a "." in them. Type "ls g*" to bring up all files that begin with a g. You may type "dir" instead of "ls". Managing the Linux Account ln (redirecting file access) Type ln -s fred.html index.html to redirect all file accesses from index.html to the file fred.html. zip/unzip Type zip to zip files and unzip to unzip files. This program is compatible with the zip program for DOS. For example: $ zip myzip file1 file2 file3 This puts the files file1, file2, and file3 into a new zip archive called myzip.zip. On the other hand, if you had the archive myzip.zip and wanted to get back the files: $ unzip myzip Typing zip or unzip by itself will give you a usage summary, showing nearly all the options availible.   du (disk usage) The Unix command du -s directory shows how much disk space is used by a directory and everything below it. While we work on creating the complicated command needed to automatically check all the directories you are associated with, you can find out how much space is in use by the WWW files for a domain with du -s /www/htdocs/domain If you don't have anything much in your home directory or mail spool, this comes close to the total space you have in use. (You would know if you did have other things in your home directory, and could use du -s $HOME to check on that.) If you have an anonymous FTP area, also check   du -s ~ftp/my.domain For example, freddy.com might need to run some number of the following:   du -s /www/htdocs/snoopy du -s ~ftp/snoopy.com du -s $HOME and add the results to find out how much space he's using. Locate (find files) The normal Unix methods of locating files have one thing in common, they are slower than molasses on a winter night in Alaska. So instead, we use a powerful program called locate. Type locate file_name and the server will immediately locate all files that contain the file_name. (Provided such files have been on the machine at least one day.) Controlling finger (For anything in this section to have effect, your home directory must be world executable. chmod o+x ~ to effect this. If you can't telnet in but can FTP in, the commands would be cd /home followed by chmod 0711 your-login.) If you wish to make information availible via the finger service to the world, put it in one or more of the following files, any of which would go in your home directory: .plan, .project, .pgpkey, .xface. If you don't know which one to use, use .plan. If you do not wish the usual information (last login, last mail reading, etc.) availible, create a .nofinger file. The contents of this file will be displayed in lieu of anything else. Doing a little work online pico (editing files) When you need to edit a file on-line, after using rlogin or telnet to log in to our machine, type pico filename to edit the file called filename. Pico is the easiest editor available to learn. Text that you type is inserted at the cursor. Your terminal's arrow keys should move the cursor through the file. Some commands that you will need are printed at the bottom of the screen. The keys to press are presented as '^X'. This long-standing shorthand in the computer world means the same as Control-X, in other words, hold down the Control or Ctrl key on your keyboard and type an 'x'. Of course, other editors are available on the system, so if you already know vi, emacs, or joe, or if you have someone to teach you the basics of these programs with you, feel free to use them. Even ed is still there for those of you updating World Wide Web pages with a teletype. Another Introduction and some help to Telnet is located: galaxy.einet.net/hytelnet/TELNET.html Some Telnet programs you can download are located: NoNags Webware Site (this site has EVERYTHING!)