Your forbin account, and how to access it from home
Students in various computer science courses, including all students in Computer Science 111 and 211, are asked to get accounts as soon as possible on forbin, a Unix machine on campus. All prospective tutors, graders, and lab assistants for the intro programming courses should also obtain forbin accounts ASAP.
Once you have an account on forbin, it can be accessed remotely from any Internet-connected machine via telnet or ssh.
You will be able to obtain an account ONLY if you are registered for the current (or next) semester and have no outstanding debts to the college (i.e. your tuition must be paid, and you must have no outstanding library fines).
If you don't yet have a forbin account but do have a Vanguard account, which allows you access machines in the public labs on campus, you may apply for your forbin account using an online form that can be accessed only via a machine on campus. Otherwise, if you don't have even a Vanguard account, you must go the Student Help Desk on the second floor of I-Bldg. to apply for your forbin account.
If you do have a Vanguard account, go to one of the URL's listed below from a machine on campus. You will be asked to read through several pages of legalese, then fill out an online form. On the form, make sure you spell you name and street address EXACTLY the same way that the Registrar's Office spells them, or else your application can't be processed. (To be sure of this, bring your tuition bill or bursar's receipt with you.) Note that the page with the form can be accessed only from a machine on campus.
The above URL's are for Queens College student accounts only. If you are on the faculty (either full-time or an adjunct), you will need to fill out a form which can be obtained at the faculty and staff help desk in I-Bldg.
Whether you are working at home or on campus, you will need to access your forbin account via either telnet or ssh. (ssh is a secure version of telnet, using encryption.) It is recommended that you use ssh, to prevent theft of your passwords.
The commercial version of the ssh client that Queens College has obtained under a free university license are downloadable from the following page (but, first, see the note below):
NOTE: Since this software is only licensed to QC (for use by the Queens College faculty, staff, and students), access to the download is limited. It can only be downloaded from nodes in the qc.edu domain. To download it from off-campus, you must go through the QC proxy server. Information about the proxy server is located at:
If you have trouble downloading the above SSH client via the proxy server, or if you simply don't want to bother, here are some sources of other SSH clients:
For information on how to use Telnet and SSH, plus a very brief introduction to Unix and the Pine mail reader, please see the Computer Science 111 preliminary tutorials, available at the bookstore.
If you have already been using plain telnet or ftp, it is recommended that you change your password after you begin using ssh. You can change your password by typing, at the "forbin>" prompt:
passwd
and then enter your old password and your new password, as prompted.
When you send E-mail using an E-mail program on your machine at home, please, as a courtesy, use unformatted PLAIN TEXT only. Otherwise, your E-mail may be unreadable by users of older E-mail clients, and/or it may pose a security risk. Select plain text as follows:
(The above info taken from The Officially Unofficial ShieldsUP! FAQ.)
Note that the above instructions for Microsoft Outlook 5 do not work for earlier versions of Microsoft Outlook. For Microsoft Outlook 4.7, you must go to the Tools menu in Outlook Express, go to Options, then click the Send tab, and select, under mail sending format, plain text. (Thanks to J. Donath for this info.)
Alternatively, you can download Eudora Light for free from the Eudora site.
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