A telnet account is just another name for Unix/Linux userid. When you sign up with us, you get a userid and password. You may ask for more than one such userid. See the Fee Schedule for pricing. Each telnet account for your domain has its own separate home directory, but shares the same www and FTP directories.

You need a telnet program to access your telnet account. Simply put in yourdomain.com as the host, and connect to the server. When you are connected, you will be prompted for your userid and password.

Some of the programs available at the shell prompt are:

• mail - a primitive email program
• pine - a more powerful email program
• ftp - to FTP onto other sites
• telnet - to telnet to other sites
• pico - an easy to use text editor
• vi - a not so easy to use (but standard) text editor
• lynx - a text-based world wide web browser.

In general, it's a pretty complete POSIX environment. You access these programs by typing in their names and then following commands relevant to each program. If you need help with any of the programs, at the shell prompt, type man and the name of the program to get instructions for that program online. If your problem is not knowing the name of the program, try apropos subject (i.e. apropos mail). It is important to remember that Unix is case-sensitive, and that "Index.htm" is not the same as "index.htm."

Note:
If you experience problems with your telnet program when accessing the above programs you will need to make a entry in your login directories .bash_profile file. Just add the following to the last line export TERM=vt100. This will allow you to access all shell programs properly.

Checking Server Space Usage

You can find out how much space is in use by the www files for your domain by using Telnet to log into your account and then from the Unix prompt, typing the following:

du -s /www/htdocs/yourdomain

This will give you a report back of the number of kilobytes (k) all files in your www directory add up to.

If you have an anonymous FTP area, also check:

du -s ~ftp/yourdomain.com

To check how much space is being used by files in your home directory, type:

du -s $HOME

Adding up the results from all three of these commands will give you the total amount of space you are using, but a simpler way of checking all three directories is to type:

du * www/* anonftp/* -c

You will then see a space report for each directory (-a to see for each file) and at the end, a total.

Changing Your Password

To change your password, Telnet to your account. After logging in with your username and password, at the Unix prompt, type: passwd

A script will ask you to type in your old password, then the password you want it changed to will be asked for twice to verify. This will not work for POP-only accounts. There is no way you can change the password for those accounts - they must be changed by sending us email and we will take care of it.