PuTTy–A free multi-protocol client

 

How could I not review one of the most used applications used as a client for SSH / Telnet (mostly anyways).

“PuTTY is a free implementation of Telnet and SSH for Windows and Unix platforms, along with an xterm terminal emulator. It is written and maintained primarily by Simon Tatham”.

The mainly protocols that PuTTY supports are:

• Raw (which means any server can accept the connection as long as you know how to work with it, like ftp or even http).
• Telnet
• SSH
• RLogin
• Serial

You just need an address, input the port (which when you select the protocol, automatically selects the default port for the protocol you chosen).

This is the default screen that you’ll be presented with when you open Putty:

 

In this review i’ll use elitter.net (a free shell provider) to show how ssh protocol works.

I’ll just input the address, select “ssh” in the protocol and the port itself resets to “22”, which is where usually ssh service runs on, and click “open”.

After clicking “Open”, it will establish the connection to the server you provided:

And this is basically it, at least for connecting to a unix box running SSH :)

There’s a whole lot more you can do with PuTTY. It’s highly configurable, you can save a session with your credentials saved so you don’t have to input all the details again, you can log sessions, configure the interface (font, colour, size, etc..), it supports proxy and you can even create tunnels using Putty.

Sure there is a lot of clients out there for the most different protocols, but this one is almost universal and highly configurable.

You also have available on their download page:

• PuTTYTel (which is basically PuTTY, but specifically for Telnet protocol.
• PSCP, which is Secure Copy Client, a tool used for transferring files securely between computers using a SSH connection.
• PSFTP, SSH File Transfer or Secret File Transfer Protocol, to access, transfer and manage files using a secured connection to an FTP server.
• PLink, a command line interface to the PuTTY back ends.
• Pageant, which is a SSH authentication agent for PuTTY, PSCP, PSFTP and Plink.
• PuttyGen, which is a RSA and DSA key generation utility.

If you need a client for these protocols, this is the way to go. Simple, neat,  organized, and very secure, this is it. Look no further.

Website

Download Putty

Putty Download Page (for all the other tools mentioned)