PuTTY plink option
There's a command line client (plink.exe) that ships with PuTTY which can be used from a Command Prompt. It can be used for SSH shell access, creating an SSH tunnel and other connections. This would eliminate the need to save the session in PuTTY, and in turn the local machines registry, which could become a chore to share and maintain across a corporate environment. I'm getting things in line to plan a deployment of RDM at our office, and the PuTTY sessions being linked to the local machine registry is really the only thing that's keeping me from doing that. I'm guessing you could even add an option to import existing PuTTY sessions into RDM to use with plink (which would not be necessary, but a very nice little feature). At the moment I'm using an entry for "Command Line" to run my plink SSH sessions via RDM and it works just fine. What do you think?
edited by jskuby on 5/21/2009
All Comments (7)
Hi,
I'm not sure I understand, you want to use plink instead of putty or you want RDM to embbed the settings in the database. Because, you are right, the biggest problem with putty, it's the use of the registry. There is some command line but not all the settings are available. I'm not a big user of putty, what command line option do you need ?
The first thing I can do, it's to offer the choice between putty or plink (like it's done for the web browser) in the connection type, but this will not help you with the session share problem, but you will gain access to the session list, do you think it could help ?
By the way, the command is a nice workaround and it was done for that and all the missing type.
David Hervieux
Devolutions inc.
David Hervieux
Yeah I'm glad you have the CL option in there. Mainly I'm looking for RDM to save the connection settings instead of PuTTY (or plink). For instance to create a local SSH tunnel to a remote server from the CL you can run: putty.exe -l <username> -L <localport>:<localhostt>:<remoteport> <remotehost>
I put PuTTY in the example because I finally had a chance to try it out via the command line and it seems to work with the same command line options that plink provides, but gives you the PuTTY window instead of a Windows CL. You are correct that it doesn't provide the extensive options that the GUI PuTTY provides, but it seems to be enough to be a functional feature. The option to select the protocol, port, user, X11, private key and local/remote tunneling I believe would accommodate most users. Another option would be to read/export the registry settings for a particular connection, save it in the database, then giving the option to restore those settings. Either way it would probably be optional to support plink, but the main choice would be GUI (stored) vs. CL (built by RDM). I know that's a lot of work (I'm a hobbiest C# programmer), but would be a great addition. I better stop there because I could think of options for this program all day :)
And sorry for the confusion of the original post.
edited by jskuby on 5/21/2009
edited by jskuby on 5/21/2009
Hi,
It's perfect, import / export was already in the plan for the version after the 5.5 and I will see what I can implements for the putty parameters.
Thank you.
David Hervieux
Devolutions inc.
David Hervieux
X11 and private key were the ones I was looking for when I stumbled onto this post. This is really nice software. Great job!
Thanks,
--
Mark
Hi
X11 and private key are missing option, I will add those in the version 5.7, but you can inject the missing option. For example, if you connect to an host named Myserver, set the textbox to something like that:
myserver -X
The -X will be added to the command line parameter and will set the X11 on.
Here is the list of the command line option in putty: http://the.earth.li/~sgtatham/putty/0.58/htmldoc/Chapter3.html#using-cmdline
I hope this hack work for you until the update
Thank you
David Hervieux
Devolutions
David Hervieux
I noticed the other parm option for Putty is currently in the Beta. Any word on the addition of using private keys through putty?
Hi,
It's on my list, I don't think that I will have the time to do it for the current BETA, but this should be in the version 5.8.
Thank you for your feedback
David Hervieux
Devolutions inc.
David Hervieux