Using Telnet and FTP
Computers on the internet have unique addresses of the form
host.subnet.net.classification.
- host is the name of the that particular computer.
- subnet is the local subnet on which the computer is located.
- net is the network that supports the local subnet.
- classification is the type of organization that runs the
net. The possibilities are
- edu -- education
- gov -- government
- org -- non-porfit organization
- com -- a commercial organization
- a two letter country name such as uk (the United Kingdom),
au (Australia) or ch (Switzerland).
With this information you can guess many addresses.
You can use a computer's address to send mail, visit it's webpages,
telnet to it or transfer files to and from it.
To start an interactive session on a computer, use the telnet
command telnet computer.name where computer.name is the
name of the computer you wish to visit. You must have login
access to this computer. Once you are connected you will have
to either set the TERM
environment variable or set the
DISPLAY environment variable.
To transfer files to and from another computer type
ftp computer.name. You will get a login prompt
like the following:
Connected to vektron.physics.wm.edu.
220 vektron FTP server (Version wu-2.4.2-academ[BETA-2](1) Mon Jun 19 21:39:15 EDT 1995) ready.
Name (vektron:guest):
Name is your username on the machine on which you are trying to
connect. It will then ask for your password on that machine.
To transfer files via ftp
you must have an account on both machines. There is
a public account on many machines; to access this
account give your username as "anonymous" and for a
password use your email address. Generally you can
only retrieve files from these accounts.
After logging in you will have an interactive
session that has a few simple commands that control the
transfer of files.