News for Shell Users

     You can login to any of our shell servers without a password by setting up ssh keys.  To do this, from a terminal on your machine type:

     ssh-copyid username@host.eskimo.com

     Where username is your login, and host is the shell server you want to connect to, for example, if I wanted to set them up for ubuntu I would type:

     ssh-copyid nanook@ubuntu.eskimo.com

     It will then prompt for your password.  After you type it you can then ssh username@ubuntu.eskimo.com or whichever host(s) you set up, and you should never need to type a password again.

     This prevents two potential issues, one it will prevent someone who installs a keyboard logger on your machine from obtaining authentication information for your accounts here.  Two, it will prevent you from getting locked out from too many mistyped passwords.

     Second bit of news, I will be attempting an upgrade of mxlinux from 19 to 21 this evening.  The dpkg program in mxlinux 19 is so old it will no longer install a modern kernel.  The machine will need to be rebooted during this procedure and may be unavailable for some time if things go wrong.  Since mxlinux does not include an updater program, this is, like debian, a very manual process fraught with potential errors.