An LMi shell account is an account on one of our Unix-based servers. All LMi Internet and Web Hosting customers can request a free shell account by emailing service@lmi.net. These accounts are activated only on request because the vast majority of our customers do not need one.
In order to access your shell account you will need to have an ssh application on your computer (telnet connections are no longer supported). If you are running any version of Macintosh OS X, just open the Terminal application and type “ssh shell.lmi.net” . If you are using Windows, you will need to download an SSH client. We recommend the free application putty.
Getting mail on the shell server
Many people prefer to use a text-based email client such as pine. You can use our webmail interface to redirect your email to your shell account (user@shell.lmi.net). Here’s how to do this:
- Login in https://webmail.lmi.net with your email username and password
- Click the Filters link at the top of the page.
- Click the “Add a New Rule” button.
- Click in the left-most pull down menu under condition. It says “Header”- change this to “All”.
- Click the “Less…” button to remove the unnecessary second rule.
- In the Action box below, click the button to “Redirect to the following email address”
- Enter the shell account address (i.e. “user@shell.lmi.net)
- You can optionally elect to to keep a local copy so you can access your mail account using webmail, or another mail client.
- Click the “Add New Rule” button at the bottom to finish.
Creating a personal webpage
Our shell server is also a web server. To post a web page, first create a new sub directory inside your shell account home directory called www. You can then FTP your content (HTML files, pictures, etc) inside that directory. You can also use the vi or pico texy editors to manually edit your HTML files. Your URL will be http://users.lmi.net/username
Technical Details
Our shell server is running Debian Linux 3.2. Below is a partial list of tools available on the shell server. If you need something that isn’t installed, please send a request to support@lmi.net. We will do our best to install it for you.
-pine
-elm
-mutt
-vi
-mtr
-pico
-traceroute
-c compiler (gcc)
-perl
-talk
-lynx
-working man pages! 🙂