Campus firewalls limit off-campus access to Hunter College servers via FTP (File Transfer Protocol), so Netscape Composer and other tools such as FTP require the use of SSH, the Secure Shell.

The following describes how you can update your web pages by tunneling through the Hunter firewall with SSH. We assume here that you use a PC with some version of Microsoft Windows and that you already know how to get around in Windows and how to open and edit a web page using Netscape Composer. While our example shows how to upload web updates with Composer, any tool you use at Hunter should work with SSH as well.

Getting SSH
Setting up and using Netscape Composer to edit and save your page
Using SSH Client to upload your page

Getting SSH

In addition to Netscape Composer, you will now need the Secure Shell (SSH) Client software. This is available at:

ftp://ftp.ssh.com/pub/ssh/

This URL brings you to a directory listing, rather than a formatted html document. Find the file that is some variation of "SSHSecureShellClient-x.x.x.exe," where the x's stand for version numbers. If there is more than one version number available, usually it is best to pick the latest. Make sure you pick a file with the ".exe" extension. To download the file, either left-click it once or, if that doesn't work, right-click it and select "Save Target As" (or the equivalent for your operating system).

The rest should be self explanatory. Note the folder into which you direct the installation file to be downloaded (e.g. the Desktop?). Install SSH by finding the downloaded installation file and double-clicking it.

If you have trouble reaching or downloading from this site, try one of SSH's "mirror sites," listed at:

http://www.ssh.com/products/ssh/download.cfm

Clicking on a link to a mirror site will bring you to the same sort of directory listing described above, and the download procedure will be the same.

Install SSH on your home computer (if you have not already done so) and set
up a special profile for "tunneling". Then have your favorite application
(say Netscape Composer) use the tunnel provided by SSH. This way, Netscape
Composer again communicates directly with your Hunter server (you can
"publish" a modified web page immediately), SSH is simply running in the back.

To set up your special profile for tunneling, follow the instructions below.

The following link on Cornell's web site illustrates step-by-step instructions:
http://people.ece.cornell.edu/schuh/tunnelssh/
This page may appear a bit overwhelming at first sight (there are 24
steps), but just follow the instructions, they do work and setting up SSH
for tunneling is a one time affair. After that, all you have to do with SSH
is to start it so that it runs in the background while you are doing work
with your favorite client/application.

The page is a bit short on how to tell your application that it is supposed
to use the SSH tunnel (rather than communicating directly with the Hunter
server) and details will vary with your application; follow the general
instructions in step 23. I tested Netscape Navigator and Netscape Composer
4.7x and it worked like a charm. (In contrast, I could not get the old
UltraEdit 8.20 to work over the SSH tunnel; but this is a moot point since
UltraEdit 10a works on its own.)

One more thing:
It appears that the Cornell people use a newer version of SSH (the current
version 3.2?) than what ICIT makes available at
http://www.hunter.cuny.edu/icit/software/Software_Download_Area_/Utilities/utilities.html
In the screen shot in step 9, the tabs do not quite match the tabs you see
in SSH version 3.1.0 (Build 235). Not to worry, click the one "tunneling"
tab, it then branches into "outgoing" and "incoming" tunneling and you can
continue with the instructions.

(Our thanks to Devra Golbe and Manfred Kuechler for alerting us to this option.)

This page was last updated on July 16, 2003