A Beginner's Guide to the PuTTY SSH Windows Client
I am focusing on the Putty because to the best of my knowledge it
is the only open source, free for use in a commercial
environment, almost complete implementation of an SSH client that
runs on all Windows systems from 95 to 2000. There are a number
of relatively expensive commercial products and some partial open
source solutions. If anyone knows of any comparably or more
complete Windows open source SSH client implementations, please
let me know.
Putty is available from
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/,
its author's web site. In the age of Windows' Installshield
programs, Putty is refreshingly unique. There are six separate
executable programs for all 32 bit Intel Windows versions plus
six more for NT on Alpha. There is no install program. There is
no compression; the programs range from 71K to 225K. You simply
download the programs you want or need to any suitable directory
from which you expect to run them. There are no hidden .DLLs
added to your system. Putty programs use the Windows registry
when they need to. The only essential program is putty.exe and
puttygen.exe if you plan to generate your own key pairs on
Windows.
In the event you ever wish to get rid of it, just delete the
programs you downloaded and erase the Registry key
hkey_current_user\Software\SimonTatham\ . If you made any
shortcuts or program menu entries delete those. To my way of
thinking, it doesn't get any easier. You know exactly what
you've done to your system and what you need to do to undo it.
After you've downloaded putty.exe, you can run it via Explorer,
Run..., Winfile or create a Desktop shortcut or Program Menu
link. Once it's started, if you plan to make a password
authentication connection, click on "Connection" under the
"Category" heading and correct your "Auto-login username" if you
have a different username on the system you are logging into than
the Windows system you are on. Click session and enter the SSH
server IP address or hostname and select SSH as the protocol.
The port will change to 22 but can be overridden if necessary.
If you are using a key pair (see the ssh
clients page for an explanation), you need to click on "SSH"
under "Category" and enter the full path to the private key file or
use the browse button to find it. Once you've entered these pieces,
if you click Open or press enter, PuTTY will make an SSH connection
to the remote server. The prompts will be as described in the
general client section. If you enter the correct password or
passphrase, you should get a command prompt on the remote system.
On the "Session" dialog, selecting "Default Settings" under
"Saved Sessions" and clicking Save will save all settings except
Host Name, Protocol and Port. If you enter a host name or IP
address and a new saved session name and click Save, all the
current settings including host will be saved under the session
name. Different sessions or hosts may use different private
keys. Saved sessions may be recalled by selecting them and
clicking load. You can make changes to the loaded information
before opening the connection; for example, you may change your
user name to a test user name or enter a new IP address to test a
first time connection to a new machine. Double clicking a saved
session automatically connects to the host with the saved
settings.
Puttygen.exe is an easy to use program to generate a pair of
keys. After you launch it, click on "Generate". You then move
the mouse to create "randomness". It then displays the "Public
key for pasting into authorized_keys file:", and prompts for
Comment, Key passphrase and Confirm passphrase. The key
fingerprints is displayed and the button to save the private key
is available after the key is generated. The one thing I don't
like is the comment is not used; you can manually edit the public
key comment when saving it but it's just a waste of typing to
provide it as asked. You can also load an existing private key
if you have the old passphrase to change it; presumably this
lets you change passphrase periodically without needing to
redistribute keys.
PuTTY also includes pscp.exe, a secure copy program, plink.exe,
a command line interface to PuTTY backends and pagent.exe, an
SSH authentication agent for PuTTY, PSCP and Plink. It does
not include a counterpart for the newer sftp program that is
available on current SSH releases on UNIX systems.
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