A remote Unix utility system for your use

There is a remote Unix system available. You will use two different user accounts on that system. First, an individual account that will be created for you; second, an account named "public". The password for your account will be yours alone. The password for "public" will be announced to the class as a whole. That is, "public" is an account that you all can use.


1. your individual account and its 2 purposes

A remote Unix system utility account will be created for you. (If you are concurrently taking two of my classes, you have one account nevertheless for both.)
Your username - your last name as it appears on my class list, all lowercase. (If there are multiple students with the same last name, I append to it the first letter of the first name in order to construct a unique username.)
Your password - is an anonymous 10-digit number that does not identify you to anybody else. To construct it, add your SMC student id number to your phone number of record at SMC (whatever number you gave when you registered; if none, use 1234567890). Take the sum's final 5 digits. Repeat those 5 digits, twice. That is your 10-digit password.
The target computer - is sputnik.smc.edu
Usage method - you will use it by independent methods for two independent purposes:
 - to log in to it remotely, obtaining a shell and conducting a usage session
 - to transfer files back and forth between it and the computer you are using locally
Students sometimes confuse these 2 different access methods and purposes. Logging in and using the remote computers doesn't transfer any files. And transferring files doesn't get you logged in to use the remote machine.


To log in, use ssh as described in "Using ssh to accsss your remote Unix account". Accordingly if your name is John Smith for example, and you are using a command-line ssh client:

  ssh  smith@sputnik.smc.edu

and give your password when then prompted.


To transfer files, use any graphical ftp client that also supports sftp, and point it to the target computer. A good free graphical multi-platform client is filezilla. Alternatively use sftp and/or scp. They are command-line file transfer components of the ssh program. They are built-in to Filezilla, see this youtube tutorial. sftp and scp could also be used on the command line in OpenSSH/linux, or as "pscp" and "psftp" as part of PuTTY. When you perform an ftp or sftp login, you will be in a private directory on the remote computer. Each student has his own. It would be named /home/smith for our hypothetical friend John Smith. There, you'll see a subdirectory named "assignments." To use scp from the command line, the most quick-and-dirty option, the syntax is:

scp  <filename>  <user>@<server address>:/home/<user>

I will ask you to transfer homework files into your "assignments" subdirectory as the means of submitting them.


A program that does both (logging in plus transferring files)

MobaXterm offers both functions combined in a single utility. By contrast other programs are dedicated to one purpose or the other. For example PuTTY is a pure-play login client that doesn't transfer files, and FileZilla is a pure-play file transfer client that doesn't log in.

Several programs that provide login connection to a remote server, file transfer connection, or both, are discussed and demonstrated in this how-to video (34m).


2. the account named "public" shared for the purpose of distributing files to the class

Distributing files to you from the remote computer - the above file transfer discussion describes file movement to and from your own home directory, exclusive to you. Sometimes I will want to have someplace to put a file so everybody can get to it and download it. When I do that, here's how to download them. If you don't know the password for the "public" account you can copy any file from /home/public to your own home directory and, since you do know your own password, gain access to the file that way. The command for copying would be:

      cp  /home/public/<your targetfile>   ~