Introduction
I like to use Putty as a terminal emulation program rather than PowerShell. For one thing, it will hold open an SSH session all day and not time out, unlike PowerShell. Here are my top picks for things to enable on a saved session in Putty.
This tutorial assumes you have created a key pair and pushed the public key to the server you want to access.
Auto Login using Your Private Key
If you want to auto login to a specific server. You have the option to add the path to your private key in each of your saved sessions. This is a good method if you are only logging into a few servers. Just add the path to you private key. Use this method in lou of running a Putty program called ‘Pagent’ to present your credentials.
Go to Connections > SSH > Authentication and provide the path to your private key.
Save Your Login Name to a Session
Go to Connections > data > add your username on the right side.
Change the Text Color
Select Colors > Default Foreground > Modify > Pick a color
Now when you open putty, you get options that make it easier to read.
Change the Font Size
Go to Appearance > Change > Select the font type & size.
Save Your Options as a Session
After you have all everything set up the way you want, then save the setting as a session. Select session > enter an IP & port, Give it a name like the hostname of the server, in my case I am just saying “Web Server” > and hit “save”.
Now when you want to start an SSH session with your web server, just launch putty, hit “load” and then “Open”. It will take you right into a session, no need to enter a username and password.
