UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi there!

We have a SCO UNIX box that uses a bunch of dumb terminals. We also have a workgroup of 5 stations Is there a way that we can network the UNIX box to the workgroup for dumb terminal.. A novice would think you could TCP the UNIX machine through a hub and use hypertermal as a dumb terminal.. Get what i'm saying? Please help thanx

-Hui The Lai

You most certainly can. Not only can you
get terminal access, but you can also set up
SAMBA on the SCO box and have it act as
a file and print server to the Windoze boxes.
Personally, I would not recommend Hyperterminal.
I would use a different telnet program like
NetTerm or somthing.

Is there a specific problem you are having?

Awesome man.. thanx.. few more questions... since your the mans and all how do i go about doing this? i gotta get the IP from the Unix box and i'm not a really good unix person.. so what i did is went through #arg -a and it gave me the router ip's but no port numbers (that i could understand anyway.) then i took the ip and put it through hyperterminal.. didn't work cause the port number is f'd up. yeah.. any suggestions?

-thanks

Wai the Lai

Try to get the SCO box internetworking with a NIC, configuring it with IFCONFIG (putting the comand line in the bootstrap script). After that, you'll have to run a Telnet server in the SCO machine, and the Telnet Client in the Win stations. If you think this is not secure, try OpenSSH...

then i would just download a Telnet client for the Unix box? wow.. alot of stuff to do! Thankz

To shead more light (hopefully), your SCO box
should already have "telnetd" (the telnet
server daemon) which can be "activated" typically
by adding (usually uncommenting) a line in
your /etc/inetd.conf file...

telnet stream tcp nowait root /usr/sbin/tcpd in.telnetd

...HOWEVER, if this machine is to be connected
to the internet in ANY way, I would recommend
AGAINST doing this as this will give a login
prompt to the telnet port 23 to anyone scanning
your IP address for that machine. In this case,
I would recommend OpenSSH (I recommend you use
SSH2 protocol as SSH1 is vulnerable without the
latest patches).

Additional info...
Windoze NetTerm client...
http://www.securenetterm.com/html/netterm.html

OpenSSH...
http://www.openssh.com/

A Windoze telnet/SSH client...
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/

I hope this helps a bit

All of the posted information is good... however... just out of curiosity... what version of SCO Unix do you have. I would assume it's Openserver. Openserver is sold in various versions. Since I noticed that you had only dumb terminals in your previous post, it leads me to believe that you might not have the "Enterprise" version of SCO. You might only have the "Host" edition or "Lightweight" edition. In order to use TCP/IP networking on a SCO Openserver machine... you must have the "Enterprise" Edition of the O/S which includes networking. Also.. the command on SCO Openserver to configure network settings is netconfig


Let me know if this helps