UNIX System Administration Handbook - Evi Nemeth [458]
like any implementation of the TELNET protocol, it has no concept of security. (But hey, who needs a command line, anyway?) Fortunately, there are a variety of terminal emulators available for Windows that are significantly more well-endowed than Microsoft’s telnet.
Our favorite terminal emulator is SecureCRT from VanDyke Technologies, Inc. This inexpensive commercial product combines the secure login and data transfer capabilities of SSH with a robust terminal emulator. It provides 56 to 256-bit ciphers for data encryption and can also provide port forwarding for other applications, such as mail. Learn more about SecureCRT at www.vandyke.com.
See page 672 for more information about SSH.
Another commercial emulator is the Windows SSH client produced by F-Secure Corporation. Information about their products is available at www.fsecure.com.
If you’re looking for a free emulator, we suggest using TeraTerm with the TTSSH plug-in. You can find TeraTerm at
http://hp.vector.co.jp/authors/VA002416/teraterm.html
The plug-in lives at
http://www.zip.com.au/~roca/ttssh.html
Together, these provide a very reasonable and secure environment.
26.3 X WINDOWS EMULATORS
X Windows is a windowing system that is in no way related to the Windows operating systems from Microsoft. X Windows was developed at MIT in the 1980s and has been adopted by most UNIX workstation manufacturers as their distributed windowing environment (sometimes, with substantial modifications). Never fear, X emulators are here.
X Windows emulators work by implementing the X11 protocol on a Windows PC. The server provides a conduit between client applications (such as the xterm terminal emulator) and the Windows desktop. Once the X11 server has been started on the PC, clients can be run from the UNIX environment and displayed on the PC desktop. For those of you who lived through the early 1990s, this basically turns your PC into an X terminal on steroids. X applications displayed in this fashion can coexist with other Windows applications on the desktop. With some emulators, it is also possible to use a window manager from the UNIX environment.
There are dozens of X emulators out there. The two that we have been impressed by are Hummingbird’s eXceed (www.hummingbird.com) and Frontier Technologies’ SuperX (www.frontiertech.com). SuperX is what Trent actually runs every day. It makes cutting and pasting between X applications and Windows applications work correctly, and its font mapping is particularly easy.
26.4 PC MAIL CLIENTS
The first thing users want to do at their PCs is check email. Providing a stable email environment is essential to most organizations; fortunately, this is one area where PCs on desktops and central UNIX servers really shine together.
PC mail clients such as Microsoft Outlook, Netscape Messenger, and Qualcomm’s Eudora are packed with groovy features and far outshine the UNIX mail readers of yore. They let users exchange regular email, encrypted email, email with attachments, and email with specially formatted or even colored text. These are essential tools of the Internet world—long gone are the days of /usr/ucb/mail and other text-only mail tools.
Organizations need to be able to provide reliable mail service to hundreds or sometimes thousands of users. That’s where UNIX comes in. UNIX provides a scalable, secure, and configurable environment for the receipt and transmission of email on the Internet. Messages can be stored on a UNIX server and accessed by PC mail clients via protocols such as IMAP and POP. This is the best of all worlds. (UNIX also has the advantage of not being susceptible to Windows viruses.)
See page 549 for more information about IMAP and POP.
Another advantage of this approach, especially when you are using IMAP, is that mail is