Shell Accounts

Shell access

We only support encrypted connections to our shell account server and therefore only support ssh.

PuTTY is an excellent SSH (and telnet) client for Windows. It can be obtained from http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/. OpenSSH is a Unix ssh client and can be obtained from http://www.openssh.com/. For Macs there's NiftyTelnet at http://www.lysator.liu.se/~jonasw/freeware/niftyssh/

Mail access

To access your POP3/IMAP account with Mythic Beasts use onza.mythic-beasts.com as the server name and your username and password are as supplied when your account was setup. If you are unsure which machine your account is on feel free to ask or check the initial mail we sent you.
You need to use POP3 or IMAP over SSL as we only allow encrypted access to shell account machines.
If you have purchased additional POP3/IMAP mailboxes then these are accessed by using username-n (with n being the number of the pop3 mailbox, typical from 1 to 10) as the username and the individual password for that mailbox as supplied when the mailbox was setup.

File access

We provide SCP access to allow you to upload files to your account.
Most of the ssh clients above allow you this access or ship with programs to allow it. Otherwise there are client programs to fetch files onto our shell account machines from remote locations such as other websites/FTP servers etc.

Mail setup

We run exim on our shell account machines with the same setup as on yali. More details can be found here. A quick summary follows.

Use a .forward-alias file to control mail delivery for alias@yourdomain - you can also use a .forward-default file as a catchall, but it may catch a lot of spam.
To place mail in your POP/IMAP mailbox then onza requires an absolute path e.g. /home/username/Maildir/ (including the trailing slash).
To forward mail elsewhere then just put the address or addresses (one per line) into the appropriate .forward-alias file.
Note that your .forward files need to be world readable so that Exim can verify valid email addresses before accepting mail.

Directory structure

Websites go in the www/www.yourdomain/ directory
The public_html directory is available from http://onza.mythic-beasts.com/~yourusername/
Both of these should execute PHP and if you create a subdirectory called cgi-bin then Perl or other CGI can be executed from there.

Quotas

To see your quota usage just run quota on your shell account machine.

Statistics

For weblog proccessing, processlogs works as on yali so see our processlogs page
For a weekly web and email account summary create an empty .usagelogs file just as on yali. This will be sent on Sundays to postmaster@yourdomain so please ensure you have setup that alias (or a default alias).

Other software

If you see other bits of software which you would like installed on our shell account machines but which aren't so far then please ask us to install them.
We will almost always install software which is in the current Debian archive which you can search with apt-cache search <some search term>. apt-cache show <package name> will give you the description and version of the package.