A "shell account" is the name for a user account on a Linux server like the Research staging webserver. The "shell" is, specifically, the "command line" interface that a user uses within a terminal program to type commands on the server.

One needs a shell account to publish a departmental site. The shell account may also come in handy for database administration and certain development tasks.

Shell account users need to use the Secure Shell (SSH) protocol (not telnet) for logging in to the staging server (research-staging.amnh.org). Telnet is an insecure protocol that is unencrypted and allows malicious parties on remote servers across the Internet to snoop its connections and obtain users' passwords. Secure shell, on the other hand, is strongly encrypted, and the probability that someone else will capture your password and unencrypt it is extremely slim.

Secure shell also has relatives named Secure Copy (SCP) and SFTP. See below.

Free SSH client software is available for all operating systems:

• For Windows, try PuTTY.
• All modern Linux and Unix variants come with SSH commandline software. Open up a terminal
  window and type "man ssh".
• Mac OS X, being one of these Unix variants, also has SSH. Run Terminal.app, which is in Applications —> Utilities and type "man ssh".

Here is an example of using SSH from a terminal window (Mac OS X, Linux, etc). Suppose my user name is "someuser" and I want to log in to research-staging.amnh.org. I would open a terminal (e.g. Terminal on a Mac or maybe xterm on Linux) and then type:

ssh someuser@research-staging.amnh.org

With PuTTY or any other GUI client (e.g. for Windows) you just need to make sure you are using the correct host name (research-staging.amnh.org), user name, and password. The port number should be 22, which is probably the default. You can probably leave any other defaults where they are.

The first time you log in to a server, you will get a message about an unrecognized key from the server. This is normal, and you can accept it and proceed. After that, you will be logged in to your shell account on the webserver.