Connecting to Course Accounts

The course account is where many files for the term are stored, and you likely will be making use of it on a regular basis. Often, it is convenient to access the course account by mounting it on the filesystem of your local machine; see MountingCourseAccountOnCampus and MountingCourseAccountFromHome for details. However, it is also often useful to have direct terminal access; for example, for running autotesting, or for checking e-mail via pine.

Connecting via rsh

This is the type of access you will be given at the start of term; your ISC grants it by putting your userid in the .rhosts file. To access the course account, open a terminal window, make sure you're on one of the student.cs servers instead of the local machine (for example, cpu-solaris.student.cs.uwaterloo.ca), and then type the following command:
rsh localhost -l csXXX
where XXX is the number of the course account you're connecting to.

Connecting via ssh

See CourseAccountSshKeyAccess for updates about a system designed to make this easier, and CSCF's SHH key page for details about generating an ssh key. In brief, if you want to connect from any machine (whether on campus, or a home machine), you should generate an SSH key. Then, copy+paste your public key (contents of a file with a name similar to id_rsa.pub) into /u/csXXX/.ssh/authorized_keys.

You will then be able to connect with a command similar to the following:
ssh -Y csXXX@cpu-solaris.student.cs.uwaterloo.ca
The use of the -Y flag enables X-forwarding so you can run windowed programs if you wish. The server can be any of the hosts on the student.cs environment.