mhc.comp.questions
Frequently Asked Questions

Index

Purpose

This is a Frequently Asked Questions document initially designed to provide answers to questions which crop up regularly and persistently on mhc.comp.questions. It is not meant to prevent questions' being asked and answered on the newsgroup, but simply to allow people to find answers to common questions in less time and without repeating the same questions over and over. Many of the answers in this document are explained elsewhere; this document is intended to be a quick reference, especially to these other sources of information. It also has a guide on how to ask questions.

In general, there is information on many topics available through your Mount Holyoke shell account. Type see topics at the prompt for the list of available topics. In addition, there are always the UNIX man pages. Simply type man pine, for example.

Finally, several common questions are referenced in the message of the day. Type motd at the prompt to see it. The text of it (as of May 19, 2001) is reproduced here for convenience:

=============================================================================
Digital UNIX V5.1 --   `exit' or `lo' to logout.
Enter: motd             To display this message of the day again.
=============================================================================
Password changing and password security.     Enter:       see passwd
For information about Internet email hoaxes. Enter:         see hoax
Continuing your account after graduation?    Enter:   see graduation
Information on how to set email forwarding.  Enter:       forwarding
Setting a vacation or auto-reply message.    Enter      see vacation
Information on connecting to MHC from home.  Enter:       see access
Obtaining a student computer IP number.      Enter:       ip-request
Information about your various disk spaces.  Enter: see accountspace
Inclement weather and general information.    Call:     413-538-2330
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Web information.
  Residence hall networking:  http://www.mtholyoke.edu/lits/network/resnet
  Other network/systems use:  http://www.mtholyoke.edu/lits/network
  General computer help:      http://www.mtholyoke.edu/lits/tsr
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Information on the health of our computer/network systems, enter:   sysnews
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

How to Ask Questions

This FAQ, and all the other documentation availabe at Mount Holyoke and elsewhere, may not contain the answer to your problems. In that case, you need to ask your question in a way that assures you the best solution with the least hassle to your or anyone else.

This means, mainly, giving as much information as you know, even if you think it might be irrelevant. If something used to work and doesn't any more, mention anything else that changed in the meantime. What were you doing at the time? Can you reproduce the problem? Did you get any error messages? (What were they? Cite them as accurately as possible.) Are you sure it's not something really obvious and simple? (If the printer won't respond, is it plugged in?) Do some problemsolving and experimentation before asking for help, and then report what you did and found out. More information is always better.

But most of all, get to know your computer system and the MHC system. Hopefully this FAQ will help you with that. Read through it, experiment, make mistakes, and learn from them. The next time you have a question to ask, you'll have that much more knowledge backing you up so that you get an answer as good as the question.

Glossary

Glossary of common internet terms

Internet Service Provider (ISP)

The company/institution that provides your internet access. On campus, MHC functions as your ISP.

Pine

The email client run on the MHC system.

PuTTY

A terminal emulation program which can use both telnet and SSH protocols to connect to a computer system.

shell

A program on a Unix or Linux computer which reads commands from the user and passes them on to be executed by other programs. A shell is generally a command-line interface, but Windows' graphical interface is also a shell.
The default shell on MHC is csh. Other common shells are sh (the Bourne shell), bash (the Bourne-Again SHell), and ksh (the Korn shell).

shell account

An account with an ISP that allows you to connect directly to the server using telnet or SSH protocols and to execute commands through the shell. Similar to shell access.

SSH

Stands for Secure SHell. A protocol used by terminal emulation programs such as PuTTY which encodes data and is secure, unlike telnet.

Tera Term

One of many terminal emulation programs which use the telnet protocol to connect to a computer system. The telnet protocol is insecure, meaning that data (such as usernames and passwords) is unencrypted and available to anyone who intercepts it. A patch to the Tera Term program can allow it to use the secure SSH protocol.

terminal emulation program

A program run on a PC or Mac to connect to another computer system. Examples are Tera Term or PuTTY.