Once you have received a username and password, you’ll probably want to log in to one of our systems. Our file server is a good place to start; its fully qualified name is beech.med.cornell.edu. If you are inside the WMC network, you can probably just refer to it as beech and things will work just fine. However, if you are trying to connect from home, another institution, or anywhere else outside of WMC, you should use the fully qualified name. Laptop users should be careful to always use fully qualified names when making permanent configuration changes. Otherwise, things may stop working when you take your computer off-site.

All of our systems are accessible for interactive logins using the ssh protocol. If you are used to connecting to systems using telnet, rsh, or rlogin, you will find that these means of connecting will not work for our systems. This is because the network protocols used by these programs are not secure; they are therefore blocked at the WMC firewall. You may find that within the Cornell campus some of our older systems can be accessed with these programs; however, this may change at any time. If you want to work effectively, you’ll need to learn how to use ssh and its related utilities. The sections below outline how to connect with ssh from various computer types.

Connecting from a Windows PC

Connecting from a Macintosh running OS X

Connecting from another UNIX computer