PuTTY

What do you do if you use Microsoft Windows and need to access a remote Linux system? For years, if you asked this question on just about any technical forum on the Internet, the answer would be simple: you install PuTTY. In fact, you had to install either PuTTY or something that was clearly a clone of PuTTY, as Windows does not include any native tools to do the things PuTTY does. PuTTY is actually a combination of several useful programs. These include the PuTTY terminal emulator, an SCP client called PSCP, a SFTP client called PSFTP, a telnet-only client called PuTTYtel, an SSH authentication agent called Pageant, a key generation utility called PuTTYgen, and a standalone terminal emulator called pterm. PuTTY is really a must have tool for anyone involved in computer systems administration. It is fast, reliable, and you cannot beat its price. It is also very configurable. That does not mean that it has no faults. Because it is so configurable, the sheer number of configuration options can be overwhelming to some. It also has no support for scripting a session or for writing a macro. Finally, even though the software has been around for 20 years, they still have not had an official release.