Connecting to the BSU Computer Science Network using SSH

Introduction

SSH is a secure method for connecting to remote computers over the Internet. Using SSH, your communication is encrypted, which prevents malicious third parties from intercepting your personal information. For more information on SSH, please refer to the informative Wikipedia article.

This document provides simple instructions for connecting to the BSU CS computer network using SSH.

SSH Clients

In order to connect using SSH, you need an SSH client, which is a program that implements the SSH communication protocol. How this is done depends on your operating system.

Linux (or other *nix)

Any modern Linux distribution should have an SSH client included. Simply type the command ssh bsu-cs.bsu.edu. Refer to your distribution's documentation for information on installing and updating your SSH client.

Apple Macintosh

You can open a terminal in OS X through the Applications/Utilities menu. Then you can run ssh at the command line as in any good Unix-based operating system, e.g. ssh username@bsu-cs.bsu.edu, where username is your username. (Thanks to Ken Moorhead.)

For older Mac operating systems, you will have to download a third-party SSH client. I haven't done this in years, so I recommend googling for more information.

Microsoft Windows

There are several SSH clients for Windows, but the two that I recommend are PuTTY and ssh.com's client:

I recommend PuTTY over ssh.com's client since it is open-source.

Another alternative is to install cygwin, which provides a UNIX-like environment for Windows. If you include the openssh packages for cygwin during the install process, then you can ssh to the CS network from the cygwin shell.