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Using Your LMi Shell Account
What is a shell account?
An LMI shell account is an account on one of our Unix-based servers. All LMi Internet and Web Hosting customers can request a free shell account by emailing service@lmi.net. These accounts are activated only on request because the vast majority of our customers do not need one.
In order to access your shell account you will need to have a telnet application on your computer. If you are running any version of Windows, go to the Start menu, and select "Run", then type "telnet shell.lmi.net" in the command prompt. this will open new terminal session of our main shell server, shell.lmi.net". Macintosh OS X users can just use the Terminal application, and enter the same command. If you are using MacOS 9.2 or earlier, you will need to obtain a telnet application. An excellent, free telnet application for the Mac is BetterTelnet.
Once you have connected to our shell server, you will need to login. The login and password are the same as your email login and password- in fact, you are really just logging directly into our mail server. Once logged in, you run commands by just typing them in, and hitting return.
Security restrictions connecting to your shell account
If you do have a shell account, but cannot open a window to our shell server, it's probably because the IP address you are coming in from is not properly forward and reverse mapped. (This would not be the case if you were connected through LMI.net). Here's how this works: An IP address (such as 66.117.151.5) can have a host name associated to it (such as "ns2.lmi.net"). Likewise, a host name should have the same IP address mapped to it. When our shell server is presented with a request to open a telnet session, we check to see if this address has a host name associated with it (this is called a reverse-IP lookup). If it does, then we check that host name to see if it resolves to the same IP address (this is called a forward-IP lookup). If the incoming IP address doesn't have a host name, or if the host name doesn't forward-map to the same IP, then our shell server will not allow you in.
Why do we do this? As a security measure. It keeps many would-be hackers from getting into our shell server. A properly forward and reverse mapped IP address generally means that the IP is maintained by a legitimate ISP or a company that can be traced back to.
Additional information: (draft, almost certainly not accurate, being edited now.)
We've moved all shell accounts on the old server to the new one, so your login name and password will remain unchanged. We've also moved everyone's ~/mail directory, so you should find any saved email you may have had. What we haven't moved are your shell .rc files, web directory or anything else in your home directory besides your mail directory, but those files will be available via ftp if you'd like to bring something over. We think you'll find this new server to be much faster and with more tools available for your use. (see below for a partial list)Since the shell server will no longer be directly connected to the mail partition, accessing your email with a shell will be slightly different. The best way to do this is through fetchmail. Fetchmail can run as a daemon, staying active as you're logged in, bringing your mail over from pop.lmi.net at an interval (the default is every minute.) We've created a shell script to help you set up fetchmail; just type "setup_fetchmail" from the prompt and you should be set. After you have fetchmail running, you can use your normal client (mail, Mail, pine, elm, mutt, emacs, mh, etc...) to read your mail, as your mail is already on the server. Most mail clients can also be setup to use pop to check mail remotely, but we've found fetchmail to be the most robust way.
To disable fetchmail, comment the fetchmail line out of your .login file. To stop fetchmail while it's running in daemon mode the command is fetchmail --quit .
The new shell server will also be running POP3, so you can use a mail client like Eudora to check mail remotely. This is important because when you use fetchmail your email will be brought over from pop.lmi.net to shell.lmi.net. You may also access your email through our webmail server by changing the mail server to shell.lmi.net.
Please note that if you have a personal web page (i.e. http://users.lmi.net/username), these files are not being transferred. Web services will remain on users.lmi.net. In order to edit your HTML files, you will need to first FTP the files from users.lmi.net, make the changes you wish, then FTP the files back.
Below is a partial list of tools available on the new shell server. If you need something that isn't installed, please send a request to support@lmi.net. We will do our best to install it for you. The new shell server is running FreeBSD 4.8.
-pine 4.55 -elm 2.56 -mutt 1.4.1i -vi -pico -traceroute -c compiler (gcc 2.95.4) -perl 5.005_03 and 5.6.1 -talk -lynx 2.8.3 -working man pages! :)
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