Putty the Free Telnet and SSH Command Line Tool

Putty the Free Telnet and SSH Command Line Tool

What is PuTTY?

PuTTY is a free implementation of Telnet and SSH for Win32 and Unix platforms, along with an xterm terminal emulator.

In really simple terms: you run PuTTY on a Windows machine, and tell it to connect to (for example) a Unix machine. PuTTY opens a window. Then, anything you type into that window is sent straight to the Unix machine, and everything the Unix machine sends back is displayed in the window. So you can work on the Unix machine as if you were sitting at its console, while actually sitting somewhere else.

Why use PuTTY?

PuTTY is one of, if not the, best SSH clients available (as far as being a Windows user). Plus, it’s free

Some features of PuTTY are:

• The storing of hosts and preferences for later use.
• Control over the SSH encryption key and protocol version.
• Command-line SCP and SFTP clients, called “pscp” and “psftp” respectively.
• Control over port forwarding with SSH (local, remote or dynamic port forwarding), including built-in handling of X11 forwarding.
• Emulates most xterm, VT102 control sequences, as well as much of ECMA-48 terminal emulation.
• IPv6 support.
• Supports 3DES, AES, Arcfour, Blowfish, DES.
• Public-key authentication support.
• Support for local serial port connections.
• Self-contained executable requires no installation.

How to use PuTTY

Using PuTTY is simple. First, of course, you have to download it! You can do so, here. I prefer using the standalone client, which you will find on the download page simply as “putty.exe”. Next, of course, since this is an SSH client – you’ll want to make sure you have SSH access. You will find that on many shared hosts, they do not allow this.

Upon opening PuTTY, you should see something like this:

Enter the Host name (either IP address or domain name), and choose the port. Since this uses SSH, and the common port for SSH is 22, you should be able to leave the port alone. Next, click on the “Open” button. This will popup a window connection to your server. It will first ask you for the username, and then the password.

That’s it, simple as that!

For more information about PuTTY, including tips & tricks, visit PuTTY’s Docs section.

You can download PuTTY here.

This article was written exclusively for Monsoon Domains by Secondversion