Basic Unix & FTP

Your web pages will be published on RIT’s main web server, which uses the Unix operating system. You’ll have to learn how to prepare your account for web use generally, and for the class projects specifically. That means creating files and directories, changing permissions, and editing files on the server.

The Unix commands you’ll learn in order to accomplish these tasks will also be useful to you in other IT courses—from programming to database to networking, as well as in downstream multimedia courses.

We’ll be connecting to the RIT server using the Terminal application in OS X. On the lab PCs, you’ll want to use the PuTTY application. On your own PC, you can do telnet from the Start—>Run command box, or you can download PuTTY or any of a number of other Telnet/SSH clients.

Readings for Basic Unix & FTP

• Chapters 1, 2, and 4 in the Unix book.
• Webmonkey FTP tutorial
• FTP: For the People
• RIT’s PDF tutorial on Fetch (requires Acrobat reader)

If you plan to use a PC to upload files to the web server from home (or the lab), you should also read through the RIT WS_FTP tutorial (also PDF).