SSH, The Secure Shell: The Definitive Guide, 2nd Edition

Advanced Client Use

PuTTY is simple to use in its most basic form. Nevertheless, its clients have many options that are worth trying out. We will cover the ones relating to SSH. Other terminal-related features, like settings for the window, keyboard, and mouse, we encourage you to explore on your own.

18.5.1 Saved Sessions

If you have a habit of connecting to the same remote machines often, set up a Saved Session, which remembers the settings for that connection so that you can reuse them. This is similar to the OpenSSH and Tectia feature of configuration files, but with a GUI. [7.1.2] Simply configure PuTTY the way you like it, then save that configuration under a name, such as “My Favorite Settings” or “office.”

When you create and name a Saved Session, it becomes available not only to PuTTY, but also to the other programs in PuTTY’s suite, such as PSCP and Plink. Just provide the saved session’s name in place of a hostname. For example, if you created a Saved Session called “office” to stand for employer.example.com, you could run:

    C:\> plink office

and it will connect to employer.example.com.

Saved Sessions are stored in the Windows registry under the key \HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\SimonTatham\PuTTY\Sessions.

18.5.2 Host Keys

Like other SSH implementations, PuTTY records the host keys of SSH servers it encounters. They are stored in the Windows registry under the key \HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\SimonTatham\PuTTY\SshHostKeys.

18.5.3 Choosing a Protocol Version

We always recommend you ...