Automate your SSH connections with PuTTY

The objective of this tutorial is to help users who, like me, are tired of typing their password into their system every time they wish to connect to their UNIX machine or router. This is especially true of people crazy about the security of their machine and will only communicate with them through SSH (Secure Shell) connections.

I will also take this opportunity to quickly present PuTTY, which is a very powerful tool that is nice to use and is even free.

Quickly, PuTTY allows connections to all systems that running any of the following protocols:

• Telnet
• SSH
• rlogin, rsh
• raw
  

It is freely downloadable from this site:
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html

There are two downloadable versions available, “Install” and “Zip”. In this tutorial we will be using the “Install” version. Download this version and start the installation with the default options.

On this download page, you will notice that it is also possible to perform a secure FTP transfer thanks to sftp, with all files passing by a service (daemon) of ssh. This isn’t done by using the standard FTP protocol port, which means it is not necessary to have an FTP server either. There is also the possibility to copy files between a Windows machine and a UNIX server, as well as a secure mode. Simply, it has a lot of functionality.

We are going to look here at using Putty in SSH mode, allowing us to connect to a server by typing the password only once in the course of the day. The server to which we will connect will be UNIX with Open SSH activated.