Human Genetics Account Information

You will first be asked for the CURRENT password, to verify that the correct person is changing it. Then it will ask you, TWICE, to type in the new password. None of the passwords will be visible on the screen, so be prepared for that. If it fails for some reason, your old password will still be in effect.

Passwords must be constructed to meet the following requirements:

A password should be at least 6 characters, with the first eight characters only having any significance. Your new password must differ from your old by at least three characters.

Your password needs at least two letter characters and at least one number or special character. Uppercase and lower case are interpreted as different characters.

Your password must be different from your login name and from any reverse or circular shift of your login name. In comparing new to old passwords, the system sees upper and lower case letters as equal.

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To login using telnet:

Start up the telnet program (or Bettertelnet on some Macs) from your PC.

Open a connection using the key command (command-o) or choose "open connection" from the File menu.

[Note the command key is the apple key on Macs, and command-o means you hold down the command key while typing the o.]

A window pops up with a field 'hostname:'

Type hg in the hostname field. You may use any of these hostnames to access your mail and home directory: hg, humgen, hgen, hgen1, hgen2, hgen3, hdklab, imager, contig, hdksun21; they represent several Unix computers networked together.

The telnet window will appear with a login prompt.

Type in your user name.

You will be prompted for your password. Enter it (but nothing should show in the window).

When the login is successful, you will see a prompt with your username and hostmachine, e.g., ben@humgen.

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Introduction to the mail (MAILX) program

The mail program is a simple mail system on Unix machines. It is easy to read and send email via a telnet or terminal window using this program. The program is limited in that it cannot handle non-text attachments. To read attachments in another format, use another program, e.g., Netscape or Eudora.

You can read the manual for the mailx program by typing at your prompt:

man mail

Briefly:

Access your email by typing at your prompt:

mail

If you have no mail on the system it will print a message. Otherwise a list of numbered messages will appear, including the sender, date, and subject.

If the list is long, to see the next screen listing numbered message,

type z

At the end of the list, the mail prompt shows the program is ready for instructions (see sections below).

To exit the mail program at the mail prompt

type q

To exit the mail program without changing your mailbox, at the mail prompt

type x

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Reading email

To read a particular message, type the number of the message

Otherwise:

If you press the carriage return key at the mail prompt, the first message will appear.

To move to the next screen of a long message, press the space bar.

To quit reading a message (from within the body of the message or at the end),

type q

To escape from reading or writing a message, control-c a couple times, and your prompt should reappear.

To see the list of messages, at the mail prompt,

type h

To delete a message immediately after reading it, at the mail prompt,

type d

To exit the mail program at the mail prompt,

type q

Read messages will be saved to the mbox,a file of read messages, when you q

To save message(s) to a different file, at the mail prompt type:

s #-& filename

...where '#' is the first message number, '&' the number of the last message you want saved to the file (if only one message is to be saved, put one number), and filename is what you name the new file.

If you quit the mail program with a q (instead of an x) after saving a message, the message will not reappear when you read mail again.

To read the mbox file or the file you created (outside the mail program), type at your prompt:

less filename

(type q to quit the less program)

To read the file using the mail program, type at your prompt:

mail -f filename

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Sending a new email message

You can start the mail program at your prompt by typing:

mail email-address

E.g., mail ben@mscns OR, from within the mail program, at the mail prompt, type:

mail email-address

In either case, the mail program will print to the screen:

Subject: (you have opportunity to type one in)

Cc: (you have opportunity to

...type in email addresses to whomever you want to get a copy. If they have an account on our system, you need only put their user name. If you're mailing another WU address, the address needs both user and machine name, e.g., chelms@sequencer (the ".wustl.edu" in chelms@sequencer.wustl.edu is understood). Otherwise the full email address is required. Separate multiple email addresses with a space or comma.

Then press the return key to get a new line.

Type in your message. To view the content of the message, type tilde-p (~p) on a line by itself and what you have so far will be displayed.

NOTE: If you are using a telnet window on a Macintosh, you may copy and paste text from another Macintosh window into the mail message. However, if lengthy, that text must have carriage returns inserted or the line length will exceed the length acceptable to the program.

To escape from reading or writing a message, hold down the control key and hit the c key a couple times.

When you are ready to send the message, type a period on a line by itself.

Your mail is set to 'verbose' mode, which means the telnet window will print the exchange between email servers, so you can tell whether or not the message was accepted for delivery.

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Replying to email

Start reading the message you wish to reply to. Either q out of the message or reach the end of the message. The mail program is then capable of replying to that message.

At the mail prompt,

type r

The mail program will print to the screen :

To: (sender's email address)

Subject: (Re:subject of that message; if there was no subject, you have the opportunity to type one in)

Cc: (you type in email addresses to whomever you want to get a copy)

Then press the return key to get a new line.

Type in your message. If you want to include the sender's message with ">>" in front of each line: on a separate line of your message, type tilde-m, which would look like: ~m and press return. A message tells you it's getting inserted, but it is not seen. To view the content of your message, type tilde-p on a separate line [~p] and what you have so far will be displayed.

When you are ready to send the message, type a period (.) on a line by itself.

Your mail is set to 'verbose' mode, which means the telnet window will print the exchange between email servers, so you can tell whether or not the message was accepted for delivery.

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Printing files under Unix.

*** Note: printing services are temporarily disabled ***

To print to your default printer type:

lpr filename

To print to a specific printer on out network:

lpr -P printer filename

These are the available printers:

abhp4050

(AB lab laserprinter in room 309)

hglpadmin

(office laser printer room 331)

hglptek

(a color tektronix printer, room 331)

Because they can be large and waste paper if corrupted, before printing a postscript file, test it by querying the computer about it:

file filename

If the computer indicates that 'filename' is a postscript document, then it should print correctly. If it thinks it is data or text, it will just print the file and not the postscript version of it.

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Sun Console

Sorry... under construction!

To run Netscape, type in a terminal window:

netscape &
It may take a few seconds to be displayed.

X-window programs include Netscape and the emacs text editor.

Basic commands are given at the user prompt. To redirect output from a program to a file, after the command type a space and a greater than sign (>) followed by a new name for the file you are creating. For example:

cat > testing
where 'cat' is the name of the program and 'testing' is the file being created. In the cat program, what the user types on the following lines will all be written to the named file once the user types in control-d. Cat is the concatenate and display program,

cat file1 file2 >file3 will concatenate contents of file1 and file2 and write the result in file3.

Many programs can be run in the background (thereby allowing you to issue additional commands at that terminal). These are programs which do not require user interaction but may take a relatively long time to complete.

To run a job in the background,type an ampersand (&) at the end of the command line.

Remote X-window display

To display the output from an X-window program running on another Sun, first give permission for the machine you are on (the home-computer) to be an X-host to the remote computer. Type in the home-computer's terminal window:

xhost remote-machine-name

Then in another terminal window where you are remotely logged into the remote machine, type:

setenv DISPLAY home-computer-name:0.0

(That last is the home computer's name followed by a colon-zero-dot-zero!) Now in this same terminal window for the remote machine, type the command invoking the X-window program. The resulting X-window display will be on the home-computer screen.

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Last updated Jan. 31, 2005