School of Computing

Secure Services

Accessing news from off campus using PuTTY

The University newsgroups are only available directly on campus. This means students at home can't access them from their own PC (although they can if they have access to a Unix host). This document explains how to setup PuTTY to tunnel through to the news server, allowing any local news client to be used.

Installing and Setting up PuTTY

Follow this seperate document to get PuTTY setup for logging into your Unix host. Once that is working return to this document to setup the news tunnel.

For most CS students the Unix host is raptor, but for MSc students it will be swallow. Staff and research postgraduates use myrtle.

Using PuTTY

Setting up the news tunnel

  • Select the name of the session you saved in the instructions above.
  • Press the Load button.
  • Go to the Tunnels option in the left column.
  • Enter 119 in the Source port box.
  • Enter news.ukc.ac.uk:119 in the Destination box.
  • Press the Add button.
  • Return to the Session option in the left column.
  • Press the Save button.

You can down login to the host as you normally would with PuTTY. When you're logged in the tunnel will be active, and when you log out it will be closed. So you need to remain logged in for the duration of the time you're using your news client.

Setting up your news client

Set up your news client as you normally would, but instead of entering news.ukc.ac.uk use localhost. The rest of the configuration remains the same.

School of Computing, University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent, CT2 7NF

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Last Updated: 07/11/2011 12:46