(http://techhouse.brown.edu/~soren/help/delkeys.txt)
Your shell (bash/tcsh) will accept any erase character.  The terminal
driver that you are using when typing in swrite only chooses the one
that is the offical erase charatcter for your terminal.  Thus you don't
notice that your delete key setting on server and client machine don't
match.

You can see what it is server-side from 'stty -a' ... then you can change
your terminal's idea of what should be the erase character with stty
erase '^H' or stty erase '^?' where ^ and the character following it
are different chracters -- stty is smart like that.  I'm assuming you
see one of those characers instead of deletion.  Tell stty that you want
that character to mean delete.

You can also make the change in your Terminal program with a checkbox that
says, "send ERASE for backspace" or "RUBOUT for backspace" or something
like that.  Toggling that checkbox will toggle what is sent from your
keyboard when you hit that key.  Personally, I have standardized on ^?
(the Mac default) and set up all my accounts and terminal programs to
use that.  You might do the same and put the 'stty' setting in your
~/.bash_profile startup file (.login if you ever were to be using tcsh --
'finger <account>' usually tells you what shell you have).


-Soren