I'm going to be a first-year medical school student this July, and was wondering if we have access to any SSH servers that Case Western may have set up. I got used to using SSH at my undergrad institution (for example, for tunneling so that no-one could steal my passwords at a wi-fi hotspot). I tried ssh'ing into filer.case.edu , but it looks like it is only set up for FTP, not SSH.

You could use VPN for added security:

http://vpnsetup.case.edu

Also, anyone can apply for a shell account in the EECS Dept:

http://www.eecs.case.edu/tech/labs/unix

http://www.eecs.case.edu/tech/labs/unix#request_an_account



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit was june 05, 08:07am by David Carlin.

The EECS thing is exactly what I'm looking for, thank you. I knew about the VPN option, but it messes around with my network settings a little bit, I'd rather use the SSH option when I can since I can just open a shell and point my system to use my local machine as a proxy.

BTW, the instructions say to "telnet to cerne.cwru.edu", but that didn't work for me. I then did "ssh newuser@cerne.cwru.edu" and that worked fine, just an FYI for anyone else reading this post



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit was june 05, 02:16pm by Sareen Shah.

Sareen Shah:

I knew about the VPN option, but it messes around with my network settings a little bit

This is why I love having a Mac ;-)

Benjamin Cherry:

Sareen Shah:

I knew about the VPN option, but it messes around with my network settings a little bit

This is why I love having a Mac ;-)

Haha well, by "messing around w/ my network settings" I meant that everything works fine before, during, and after a VPN session. But changes are made under the hood that I'm not fully aware of (same thing happens with Mac and Windows). I'm actually using a Linux distribution, and I'm sure with a little bit of research I can figure out exactly what is being changed, but I'm a bit too lazy to bother with that.

Also, w/ a VPN client, I dunno how to direct only specific programs to use the VPN, everything gets routed through it (browser, instant messenger, thunderbird, etc.) But w/ an SSH tunnel I can specifically direct my browser to use it and let the other apps avoid it (for example, if I'm at home and only want to connect so that I can access journals available on-campus or something). And no settings get changed unless I specifically set them.

Note: if you are on CaseGuest wi-fi (the campus wireless) your bandwidth will be severely throttled unless you use the VPN. Using an SSH tunnel to a campus machine helps somewhat (since campus connections are not throttled quite as heavily as Internet connections) but the VPN is still faster.

Unless you have a very fast and expensive network, VPN does not make you be slow, as far as my experience. VPN and SSH has similar or same security features.
(By the way VPN is usually more expensive devices :-) )
SSH tunneling is the cheaper alternative solution of VPN.

I guess you can do what you want with some tricky routing table configuration.
Because VPN makes a new virtual network device. you can make a routing table to
choose one among your network devices by looking for the IP address in the routing table. However, this is a just guessing and I will not do that because the routing table is based on IP addresses and IP addresses may be updated sometime.

Benjamin Cherry:

This is why I love having a Mac ;-)

Way to be an idiot. Your Mac still does exactly what Windows machines do, with nice binary blobs from Cisco to do it. Cheers for the Mac "Community"

http://computer.howstuffworks.com/vpn.htm (i dont appreciate having posts deleted without complaints given.)

Samuel Rees:

Benjamin Cherry:

This is why I love having a Mac ;-)

Way to be an idiot.

Way to be a dick. Using VPN for OS X is easier than VPN for Linux.

Nicholas Lafrenz:

Using VPN for OS X is easier than VPN for Linux.

That's subjective.