Real World Computing
The indispensibles
20070413 [PC Pro]
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1 Chicken Of The VNC remembers the state of your session in between logins to a remote machine - no more having to configure your environment every time you connect. |
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2 MultiTail: keep track of multiple logfiles in the same window. |
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3 What's SSH? As we were writing this column, we realised we've mentioned SSH in several places. If you're familiar with Linux/Unix, you probably know what it is, but in case you're confused we thought we'd give you an explanation. SSH stands for Secure SHell and is the preferred way of connecting to a remote machine. In times past, everyone used a program/protocol called Telnet to remotely log into a different machine, but Telnet sends all your information in plain text, which means that anyone could eavesdrop on the network and read everything you were sending - including, of course, your passwords. SSH, on the other hand, encrypts everything, so eavesdroppers are left none the wiser about what you're doing. These days, it's extremely rare to see anyone using Telnet, since everyone with any sense uses SSH instead. Macs, and any implementation of Unix or Linux, come with a built-in SSH client - just type SSH <server.name> and you'll be connected to that server. If you're running a Windows box, though, you'll need to download an SSH client in order to connect to remote machines. The most popular such client by far is PuTTY, an open-source SSH client and xterm emulator written by Simon Tatham. All of our developers whose desktop systems run Windows use PuTTY, and we can highly recommend it to any Windows user who needs to remotely connect to a Unix box. If you're still using Telnet, let this be your impetus to change! |
