Allow agent forwarding
$putty_cool_factor *= 10;
Putty’s cool factor just went up an order of magnitude.
I ditched secureCRT for Putty some time ago. Two things initially promoted the move:
- The need to not only ssh but scp between unix & windows boxen.
- Putty was free.
However, once in Putty, many thing convienced me I made the right move:
- Putty’s support for color (both in xterm & in emacs).
- Less clutterly windows. (Putty much more closely resembles an xterm.)
- Paegant (i.e. ssh-agent)
- Starting sessions via putty @<session> (although since XP drops ‘@’ from shortcuts, the utility of this has somewhat declined).
Some of these may have improved in SecureCRT since I’ve left it world, so forgive me if my information is data. Once I left SecureCRT, I never looked back. ;-)
Today I just found out Putty has something even cooler:
- Allow agent forwarding
(If you don’t use ssh-agent, skip all of this. Just know that Putty rocks.)
Previously I would need the equivalent of two ssh-agents running. One to open the connection to my work-station & get a bash shell. The second would come from once on my work station, I would have to run have to run:
> ssh-agent /usr/local/bin/bash
> ssh-add
to subsequently hope around to other machines.
Putty’s “Allow agent forwarding” gets your around that whole second mess & instead forwards the agent from your first connection to your subsequent connections on the remote machine.
Coooollllllllllllllll.
June 21st, 2003 at 5:38 am
In WindowsXP Professional, if you select New->Shortcut from the desktop right-click menu, enter the following without quotation marks in the location field: “putty @sessionname” and then select a name for the shortcut, it apparently works. When I add the @sessionname feature through the New->Shortcut method or by manually editing a clean putty shortcut, the @sessionname seems to disappear from view, however it still works for me (chooses the correct session). I’ve tried testing this with a clean putty shortcut, which brings me directly to the Putty configuration screen.
October 20th, 2003 at 6:32 am
Bizzarely, if you put _two_ spaces between the putty and the @session, XP doesn’t throw away the @session.
I wish someone would explain what the hell XP is up to.