Frequently Asked About Annie
(and the answers!)

Last Updated 1996-11-10
Q: What the dickens is an Annie prompt?

A: Think of Annie as your friend. She'll let you telnet to some remote computer, change your connection to PPP or SLIP, and she can hangup the phone for you. "Annie" is the name of our communications server. Her IP Address is, well, you don't really need to know that do you? Her fully qualified name is annie.goldinc.com

Q: I typed "passwd" to change my password, but all I got was CLI: Command not found.

A: It's useful to think of the "Annie prompt" as just another command line interface, or CLI -- something that says "I'm waiting for you to type a command". You may have seen a C:\> prompt before. That also indicates a command line interface, used in Microsoft DOS. Yes, there are commands to be learned if you want to use a CLI to all its glory, but you can start right away with Annie's "ppp", "telnet" and "hangup". The important point is that the commands available at the Annie prompt are going to be different than the commands available in other command line interfaces. In particular, the "passwd" command is a Unix command. You need a Unix CLI for that. Your goldinc passwd is changed by logging in to "www", aka "longbeach", and executing the passwd command at the Unix CLI. When you type "passwd", you'll be prompted for your old password, then twice for the new one.

You change your password with the following steps:

  1. Connect to goldinc, and get to the Annie prompt.
  2. Rather than typing "ppp" (or having your script do it), type the following command: telnet www.goldinc.com
  3. You will be prompted for your username and password since the machine known locally as "www" is really "longbeach.goldinc.com" -- just another one of those millions of machines you can connect to. The difference being, of course, you have a user account on our machine.
  4. Enter your username and password at the "longbeach login:", just like you may have, earlier, at the "annie login:".
  5. You will then have a new command prompt. Rather than prompting with "Annie: ", this CLI will prompt with "longbeach:~$ ". The name of this machine is longbeach.goldinc.com -- are things starting to gel, yet?
  6. Type the command "passwd" and follow the instructions.
  7. Type the command "logout" and you'll be returned to the "Annie: " prompt.
  8. From there, you can enter "ppp", "hangup", or "telnet some-place-else", if you have an account on some other machine on the Internet.

    summary: You need to be at the longbeach CLI. longbeach's CLI prompts for a command with longbeach:~$ and yes, the commands available there are different, in general, than the commands available at the Annie prompt. They're also different, in general, than the commands available at the MS-DOS CLI.

    Q: Commands for this, commands for that... why do I need to learn so many different commands?

    A: You don't. The login sequence can be scripted, your connection can be automatically switched to PPP, and you can start up a World Wide Browser by clicking on an icon. However, realize that the precursor of all this multi-media World Wide Web stuff was the much simpler "hypertext". If you haven't surfed the Web using lynx, a text mode browser, you really don't know what you're missing: Lightning fast hyperlinks and text displayed as text. No waiting for superfluous inline images to load, background images to redraw, etc.
    lynx is just another one of those commands, like "ftp", "telnet" and others, that are available at a Unix command line interface. CLIs can be quite powerful -- especially if you have a computer that isn't quite up to GUI-style Web Browsing software.

    Q: Why "Annie"?

    A: Annie is a Xylogics communications server, also called an Annex.
    "Annie" the Annex. Easy to remember, no?

    Q: Why did you have to capitalize the "A"? Why did the "P" in password have to be capitalized? Why isn't the "L" in "login:" capitalized? Why do I have to type my username/password sequence twice to be able to change my password?

    A: Hey! Who's dime is this, anyway? That's four questions:

    1. The "A" in Annie was capitalized to distinguish waiting for "Annie: ", from waiting for the annex login line, which looks like "annie login: ".
    2. The "P" in password was capitalized for the Annie password prompt in order to more closely resemble a Unix login sequence, where the P in password is also capitalized.
    3. The "l" in login is not capitalized in the Annie login sequence for the same reason.
    4. You login in once to get to the communications server, then you telnet to the host where the usernames and password are stored and can be changed via the passwd command. Your account on that host computer is protected by a username and password, just as the communications server is protected by username and password. Unfortunately, the command for changing your password is not available at the Annie CLI. You must use a Unix CLI, and that requires the "additional" login to longbeach.goldinc.com
    Oh, and if you don't want to think about which word gets capitalized, you can choose to wait for the last character of each prompt, followed by the colon and the space. That is, wait for "n: ", then wait for "d: ", then wait for "e: ", then send "ppp" CR.
    Q: Gosh you guys make things difficult. We have a PPP server where I work at some-business-establishment and your login script is far more complex than what I use to get a PPP connection there. All I have to do is dialup and enter "ppp" followed by a CR.

    A: Really? What's the phone number? :^)