Connect

Windows

PuTTY

To connect to RedBrick on Windows, you'll need a program called PuTTY. It implements SSH (Secure Shell), which is a way of remotely controlling your acccount on our machines as though you were sitting at them.

Download putty.exe from here.

Open it up and click the RedBrick! button.

Enter your username.

If you enter your username incorrectly and press enter, you'll have to close the window and start again. We didn't come up with this idea!

See "After connecting" below.

Within DCU

Something to note if you're logging in using the computing labs' (and I assume other buildings') computers: all of 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 in PuTTY and click on Open. You may 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.

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 simply have to do is right click.

RedBrick Ubuntu

Use the "Connect to RedBrick" icon on your desktop. Alternatively, you can follow the below instructions.

Other Unix (GNU/Linux, Mac OS, BSD, Solaris)

Open a terminal/console and type "ssh login.redbrick.dcu.ie". This will work on the version of SuSE installed in the labs.

After connecting

You should get something 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:

Remember: don't worry that nothing comes up when you type your password in; it's a Unix thing and the password is still being entered.

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

This is called the shell, although you will hear people refer to it as a console or terminal also. A shell interprets commands that you enter, similarly to MS-DOS or cmd.exe on Windows. The default shell is zsh. If you want to change this, please ask helpdesk to explain how and the potential complications that may arise.

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 enter. 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.

See Also

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