Hi Dan, On May 19, 2008, at 09:08AM, Dan Eickmeier wrote: >Thanks as well for the Very detailed explanation as usual Ester. I >was wondering about that too, if I was in a situation where I was >using somebody else's mac, and totally away from my network, could I >log in this way as well? I've got a free host from http://no-ip.com, >so could I log in giveing that as the address if I was totally away >from my network?
Yes, if you have set up your Mac to allow remote logins you can use SSH to log into your Mac from another machine. However, you need to be able to access the IP address of the remote machine from the machine you're logged into. For example, many people have home networks that connect into a cable modem unit. If you connect an AirPort Express or similar wireless router to the cable modem all your wireless machines can join your local network and share your connection. However, they get assigned local network addresses like 10.0.1.3, 10.0.1.4, etc. or 192.168.0.3, 192.168.0.4, etc. These are private addresses that only work on your local network that are generated by NAT (network address translation). Those numbers tell you that you can use these IP addresses to SSH into a machine on your local network. You can also SSH from any of these machines to a computer with an IP address outside of your home network. However, you can't SSH into one of these machines from outside your home network, because your router is distributing addresses so they can be shared, and there's no unique address that connects to a specific machine from outside your network. In the example I gave, you'd have to connect your cable modem ethernet connection directly into a single machine, and then you could remote log into it from outside your network, provided that you had enabled remote login and also knew the IP address that was assigned to that machine. I'm not sure that I know how your free host works. Presumably, that's a public machine that you could access that might have mirrored some of the content on your Mac? For a dot Mac account, for instance, you could have some of your files mirrored on an iDisk on an external machine. Then, from any other Mac, you can log into your dot Mac account and access the files on your iDisk. You can do this through the graphical interface (no need to limit yourself to the terminal), and you don't have to know anything about SSH or SFTP! In this case Apple handles the address information transparently for you -- they keep track of your dot Mac login name and password, so you don't have to know which machine is physically hosting your file contents. However, in general, if there is another server that has an IP address and hosts an account for you, yes, you can remote login onto that machine from any other computer. I don't know whether I've answered your question, but maybe someone else can chime in here with more information. Typically, you might use remote login on a home network to transfer files, or to try to troubleshoot when a display is frozen and a computer doesn't seem to be responding. For this last function you would probably have some unix background. You might also use remote login to get to another computer outside your home network. HTH Cheers, Esther >On 19-May-08, at 11:22 AM, Esther wrote: > >> Hi Jane, >> >>>> What exactly is Remote login? Does it mean what I think it means, >>>> maily that I can "log in" to my account on the iMac using my >>>> iBook? If I am doing so on my own iBook, can someone else log into >>>> antoher account at the same time using another iBook? >> >> Yes, if you have enabled remote login for your computer, other >> users can log into accounts on that machine at the same time through >> the terminal application. <snip out details about SSH> >> >> ssh -l jane 10.0.1.3 >> >> or I prefer to use the format with the AT sign used for email: >> >> >> ssh [EMAIL PROTECTED] >> >> (The Mail Archive will block this, so read this as: >> >> ssh jane AT 10.0.1.3 where "AT" is replaced by the at sign and >> there are no spaces around the symbol). >> >> You'll be prompted for your password on the remote machine.
