Secure Shell Clients for Macintosh

Secure Shell can be considered a secure form of a telnet connection. Like telnet, it allows you to connect directly to another machine to issue commands. Unlike telnet, it encrypts all traffic sent, most importantly your username and password.

There are two different Secure Shell standards, known as Secure Shell (SSH) 1 and 2. SSH2 is newer and considered much more secure, so you should use it if possible.

You can use either SSH1 or SSH2 to connect to bama.ua.edu. Other servers may only support one of the two, so you should check with the system administrators of other machines you will need use.

Macintosh OS X

Secure Shell support (both 1 and 2) is built into OS X and can be accessed through the Terminal application (located in the Applications/Utilities folder). At the prompt, type "ssh user@server", where server is the name of the computer to which you would like to establish a connection and user is your user name on that computer. This command will automatically select the appropriate version of SSH.

There are also a few free terminal replacements for OS X, including iTerm and MacTelnet that you can use in the same manner. Some terminal replacements include bookmarks, or you can use a shortcut manager with Terminal. One such (free) application is JellyfiSSH.

Macintosh OS 9.x and prior

MacSSH is an open-source SSH2 client that is used widely on campus.