Putty is a simply great ssh client and works nicely with open-ssh, which is found in Ubuntu Linux, Site5 and just about everywhere.
A nice feature of ssh is the ability to generate a public key that can be used to log into a server without having to give a password, or as extra secutiry in addition to the password.
Here is a procedure for creating ssh keys that can be used in both open-ssh and putty:
- On windows, install the open-ssh package with Cygwin
-
execute the command
to generate the dss key. You may need to create the directory ~/.ssh in Cygwin bash for this to work. This will create a file in this directory called id_dsa.pub
ssh-keygen -t ssh-dss
- use sftp/ssh to copy the id_dsa.pub file to your ssh server box. Put the contents of this file (which is one big long line) at the end of a file called ~/.ssh/authorised_keys2, adding it to any other keys that are already there.
- back on windows, execute the command 'puttygen', from the putty site.
- In putty gen, use file/load private key to load in the file ~/.ssh/id_dsa
- Choose 'save private key' and store it somewhere handy where putty can find it. You may be prompted to enter a passphrase. This is a password used in addition to the key when connecting to the server. If the passphrase is blank then you don't have to enter it, the connection will be automatic.
- Open putty and enter the details of the server you want to connect to (address etc)
- In the 'connection' settings, enter your login name in 'Auto-login username'.
- In Connection/SSH/Auth, in the box 'Private key file for authentication' load the putty private key file.
- Save this configuration so you don't have to do it again.
- Click 'open'
Your life won't be the same again.
Peter's Moblog
You might already know of it, but with ssh you also get another way to speed up connections from the prompt to another machine. I only discovered it recently, and it's saved me a whole 4 characters each time (wow!). Ok, not so much gain but kinda handy.
Along with the other ssh binaries, you get ssh-argv0. Which does as it says (if you can work it out) - symlink to it or alias it with a command the name of the machine you want to login to eg.
ln -s /usr/bin/ssh-argv0 machinename
and whenever you run the 'machinename' symlink, it will act like "ssh machinename". I also set up my personal (or could use system-wide) ~/.ssh/config so it knows which user and which port I log in to various machines with by default (see man page for ssh_config).