Can't send email to non students through student account, nor FTP or telnet into school server, HELP!

[EvilYoda]

Just like the title says, I just found out that the emails I've sent in the last two days haven't been reaching their recipients. Up to Monday I had comcast, but then I switched over to WideOpenWest internet. It's faster, but now I can't do anything other than check my mail through the mail server and send email to other students.

Anybody with an idea on what's going on, I really would like to figure this out, thanks.

 

[QTPie]

Why dont you call your ISP and ask them?

 

[bizmark]

For pseudo-security reasons, my University's servers won't accept connections from any IP that doesn't have a valid DNS name. With my ISP at home, sometimes when I login, I get a DNS-assigned IP, and sometimes just a plain IP. When I just get a plain IP, I can't connect to my university. That's when I SSH through my friend's linux machine Try and find out what IP(s) you have assigned by your ISP. Then run "nslookup XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX" for that IP. If no name comes up, I'm betting that this is the problem.

 

[EvilYoda]

Well, I emailed the network people at the university, since I figure they'd be more knowledgable than WOW.

wbwither, thanks for the information, I'll do that. Hopefully this gets changed soon.

 

[bizmark]

from a PM:



<< I'm not too familiar with SSH, but I know that I just used SSH to telnet into one of my school's engin servers, which was one of my problems, so that one's solved. But how do you, or can you, use that connection to ftp elsewhere? Is there any way to run other programs with that connection? (I don't particularly want to FTP using command line, I'm lazy )

If you can just let me know how you do things, I'd be much obliged, thanks. >>



You really can't use an SSH connection to FTP to anywhere else if you don't want to command-line it. What you would do is log in using SSH, then "sftp server.university.edu", then get and put all your stuff, which would then be on the intermediate machine you're using. Then use an (S)FTP client to get all of it from there.

Really you should NEVER use plain Telnet or FTP. Ever. That sends your password in cleartext to the server. If a hacker was sniffing, he could get it and screw with your account. This actually happened to a friend of mine. My friend lost his entire webpage when some asshole deleted it Fortunately, the university had backed everything up the previous week, so he didn't lose much, but it was still a hassle.

Unencrypted communication = bad. Simply put, SSH is just an encrypted version of Telnet, using public key cryptography. Use it always. Do not use Telnet. (I recommend the free SSH for Windows client PuTTY.) Also, do not use unencrypted FTP if you have a choice in the matter. There are several secure implementations of FTP: SFTP, FTP over SSH, and Kerberized FTP. It just depends on your University as to which you should use. At my university, we can use any of the three. I don't know of any free graphical SFTP clients. My university provides a few in the Connectivity Package which they give to students. There is a free command-line one available at the PuTTY site, called PSFTP. You may be able to "find" one some other way

The fact that you could still send email to other students suggests that there's more to your problem than just (non)encryption issues. (On May 1, my university ended all non-secure connections to the server -- I think it was one of the last universities in the nation to do so. Anyway, at that point, a lot of people started having problems with various email clients and whatnot.) Anyway, at least you're able to connect now. I think that talking with your University's helpline people should be really helpful.

 

[gopunk]

ssh'ing is will get you command line... it is just like if you were on that computer in real life. you can do just about anything. if you just need to move files, scp is probably faster and easier than sftp.