MAIL AND NETWORK BASICS

CS 3000 -- Lab Assignment #2

Mail and Networking Commands -- Read this material. Do the exercises here that you don't understand completely.

  1. Login to one of the Sun Ultra's. See who else is logged on by using the finger, w, and who commands. Notice the differences among the displays. Do finger @pollux to see who is logged in on pollux. Do finger @ra to see if anyone is logged in on ra. Do some commands of the form finger user, where user is the first name, last name, or user name of someone who has an account on the computer you are logged into. (You may choose one of your classmates.) The names of the Sun Ultra's in the lab are:

    altair, arcturus, barnard, capella, castor, centauri, ceti, deneb, omicron, polaris, pollux, regulus, rigel, saiph, sirius, sol, soleil, spica, vega, and zaurak.

    Do some commands of the form finger @hostname, where you make "hostname" one of the names of the Sun Ultra's. Are the results what you expect? Do they agree with the signs on the computers and the identities of the people you see sitting in front of the computers?

  2. Send mail to yourself. Send mail to at least one classmate. Send one mail message to two people, possibly yourself and another classmate. Use the -v option when sending this mail

    Example: mail -v jsmith@vega

  3. Read your mail using the mail command from a terminal window.

  4. Reply to the mail that other people sent to you.

  5. Delete unwanted mail.

  6. Read the manual page for the netstat command by executing:

    man netstat

    and look at the -n and -r options. Do the command:

    netstat -nr

    Try to figure out what the output means. Try the command:

    netstat -r

    Does that make the output more understandable?

  7. Read the man page for the arp command.

    Execute this command

    arp -a | less

    What does the output mean?

  8. Read the man page for the ifconfig command.

    Enter this command:

    ifconfig -a

    Try to figure out what the output means.

    Ask your instructor to run the command as super-user sometime - so you can see the address of the ethernet interface.

  9. Do

    man ndd

    The Solaris ndd command has some similarity to ifconfig. It's purpose is to get and set configuration parameters of device drivers - including network interface device drivers. Ask your instructor to run these commands as super-user sometime:

    /usr/sbin/ndd /dev/hme link_status

    /usr/sbin/ndd /dev/hme link_speed

    /usr/sbin/ndd /dev/hme link_mode

  10. Do

    man route

    Ask your instructor to show you the scripts used on alcyone to connect it to a subnet via ppp.