Comparison of Windows SSH clients
SSH is about a secure connection between a server and a client. There are a lot of Windows SSH clients available in the internet. The best one is PuTTY. I believe that almost all Linux users have experience to use PuTTY. It is simple and easy to use. However, it has some drawbacks. Some other products just good enough to overcome PuTTY;s drawback and provide more functionality. Here I provide a short review and several Windows SSH clients.
PuTTY
As I said this is a best one I love. It is simple and easy to config and use. You can run many instances as you want. For each running instance, you can connect to same host or different hosts. That is your choice.
Figure 1 show the configuration window. You can enter your host name, such as domain name, or IP address (192.168.2.10) and save the configuration to a session. You can connect to the same host by selecting the session. If do not need do fancy things, the IP or domain name is enough for the configuration.
Figure 1
Once you enter host name of IP adress or select a session, Figure 2 will popup and ask you enter user name and password. If everything is ok , you will log in your host Linux system.
Figure 2
Of course, you can do a lot of advanced thing with PuTTY, such as tunneling for different port. Here is simple example about tunneling (from http://www.fampennings.nl/maarten/nslu2/nslu2.html#whatisssh). Since SSH is able to act as a tunnel, for others TCP/IP connections. What this means is that one choses a fresh port on the client that must be securely tunneled by SSH to some port on the server. For example, let us try to access the web interface of the webserver via an SSH tunnel. This is helpfull since it allows us to remotely login as administrator with sending our password in the clear over the internet. On the remote, the service (webserver) sits behind port 80. We pick a free port on the local (the PC) say 3456. And we configure the SSH client so that messages to local port 3456 are forwarded to remote port 80. To add a “Forwarded port” to our session enter the following three fields: forward local port 3456 to destination Nas:80 (a host name followed by a colon and a port number on the host) and then press Add. The forwarded port “L3456 Nas:80″ is added to the list (one session could have multiple forwarded ports).
Figure 3
When SSH connection opens, we can use http://localhost:3456 to visit remote server’s web service. This is just a demo. You can do a lot of thing through tunneling.
Things I am looking for in PuTTY lincludes 1) I can duplicate the same host window multiple times without re-log in in a separate window and 2) Organize all PuTTY windows nicely in a tabbed window. PuTTY does not provide these functionalities. You have to open another session and log in another. In addition, PuTTY does not provide file transfer function. You cannot direct copy file from the connected host to your local machine.
PuTTY Connection Manager
PuTTY connection manager provides a solution to organize PuTTY console windows in a tabbed window. This is nice. We do not need to switch back and forth to find the right console we want. Figure 4 is the main window of the PuTTY connection manager.
Figure 4
Private Shell
Private Shell is a pretty good SSH client. But it is not a free product. The nice thing it provides is you can use to to manage files on server very easy and download and upload from from the server to and from the local machine (Figure 5 and 6).
Figure 5
Figure 6
Tunnelier
This is a SSH client with a lot of windows. At the very beginning, it looks awful. You have to manage all these windows at one screen. But it is free and provide function to duplicate console window by one click. That is the thing I like it best. Figure 7 is the main window used to manage all connections. Figure 8 is the console window, just like the PuTTY one. Figure 8 is the SFTP window that provide function to transfer files from the remote server and the local machine.
Figure 7
Figure 8
Figure 9
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