Connect

Using Putty

Download putty from here.

Open it up and click the redbrick button.

Type in your username.

If you make a mistake typing in your username while using SSH (ie when you click the big "Redbrick" button to log in) you'll have to restart as you can't go back to edit it.

Type your password (note, nothing appears when your doing this. That's delibrate. It's a unix thing).

When you're logged in, type help.

Or if you want to dive right in, type chat.

Once you've finished with all that and find you want to leave (!) you can type logout to end your session.

Something to note if you're logging in using the Computing Buildings (and I assume other buildings) computers:

All the machines in DCU are in a state of deep freeze, this means that anything that you do will be competely "forgotten" when the machine is turned off.

This means that all the software on the machines will not change, so any changes to settings will not be saved.

When PuTTy was installed, our own version with the "RedBrick!" button was not used, instead you'll have to type "login.redbrick.dcu.ie" into the "Host Name (or IP address)" bar and click on Open. You'll then be asked about changed RSA keys, to which you should click "Yes" and then you can log in.

Also the character encoding is wrong, it should be UTF-8. To change this go to Window -> Translation -> Received data assumed to be in which character set: and choose UTF-8

Alternatively, you could try installing PuTTy on your H:/ drive where it will remain saved after you log off.

Anyway.

After you've clicked on the RedBrick button (or used login.redbrick.dcu.ie) you should get somemthing that looks like this:

Only instead of "newb" as used here, you insert your own username (note: if you make a spelling mistake with your username with PuTTY and press return, you will have to close PuTTY and start all over again because PuTTY is weird like that). After you press return you will then be asked for your account password like so:

Don't worry that nothing comes up when you type your password in, it's a unix thing, the password is still being entered.

And that's it! You're officially on RedBrick, congratulations. It should look something like this:

Now, I'm sure you're wondering about all the fun things you can get up to. Well to start with you could try typing "help" to give a brief list of available commands:

Fun times.

The best step would probably be to type chat.

...and hit return. This will cause this to appear:

You've come so far in such a short space of time. It's time to move on to the IRC wiki page.

Note about copy/paste with PuTTY

By default, PuTTY has highlighting as copy and right click as paste. This leads many people who try to copy and paste for the first time to copy the same link into chat several times, here's how to do it properly:

If you wanted to highlight the url to the RedBrick website all you do is simple click and drag over it to highlight it (it'll look like this:)

And that's it copied, you can now go to your web browser and ctrl + v or right click and paste like you would normally.

If you want to paste some copied text into chat, all you simple have to do is right click.

See Also

PuTTY Manual - A more indepth tutorial on how to use PuTTY