Using PuTTY to access a Unix Box

PuTTY Notes

Use PuTTY to connect to Unix boxes (such as the staging machines used in SDL). Download it from here. The basic way to use it is to enter sdlstudentvmX.msoe.edu as the Host Name, select SSH as the Protocol, and click on Open. If this is the first time logging in to the machine, you'll get a security alert" about the host key not being cached in the registry. The usual practice is just to accept the key; if it changes in the future, you'll get an error message.

The system will prompt for a username; enter name@ad.msoe.edu (all in lower case, where name is your username). You will then see a "Password:" prompt; enter your single signon password followed by the enter key. Remember passwords are case-sensitive as well. The system will not echo anything back as you type in your password, and unless you configure the backspace key (see below) you'll have to press the enter key or Control-U and start over to fix mistakes.

Using PuTTY

A common issue related to PuTTY is how to cut and paste between windows. If you hold down the mouse button and "paint" a section of text in the PuTTY window, it's automatically in the cut and paste buffer and you can insert it into another application (Word, for example) by typing that application's Paste key (for instance, Control-V). To paste into PuTTY, right click with the mouse.

Configuring PuTTY

You can use Putty without changing any settings, but there several settings that most people find useful. Each assumes you're looking at the "PuTTY Configuration" dialog, the one that opens when you first run PuTTY.

In Terminal->Keyboard, set "Backspace key" to Control-H
In Terminal->Features, put a checkmark in "Disable application keypad mode"
Still in Terminal->Features, clear "Disable destructive backspace on server sending ^?"
In Window->Appearance, click on the Change... button and set the font to Courier New, Bold, with a Size of 12 or whatever you find appropriate for your screen resolution.
In Window->Colours, click on "Default Foreground" and set Red to 255, Green to 255, and Blue to 0. If you like you can change the "Cursor colour" to match.
To avoid entering your username frequently, you can click on Connection->Data and enter your username as "Auto-login username".

You can save these settings by clicking on Session, entering something reasonable under "Saved Sessions" such as "sdl", and clicking on Save. This allows you to load the settings the next time.

Frequent Problems and their Solutions

This list is based on things you can fix in PuTTY. You might also check the list of Unix issues to see if there's a solution to your problem there.

I sometimes get logged out of a Unix system automatically. Unix systems will sometimes log people out if there's no activity for several minutes to avoid problems with "zombie" processes. You can fix this by opening up the PuTTY Configuration page, clicking on the Connection item, and entering a number in the "seconds between keepalives" box. 100 seconds seems to work.
Whenever I press the backspace key, I get ^? in the window. You need to configure PuTTY to interpret backspace correctly. You can do it for the current session by right clicking on the PuTTY title bar, selecting Change Settings..., clicking on the word "Keyboard" below the Terminal item, and set the "Backspace key" entry to "Control-H". See the above configuration notes to learn how to make this change permanent.
How do I cut and paste text between Unix and Windows (or some other operating system)? To copy text from a PuTTY window, simply select it using the mouse, switch to the other application, and press the paste key or button. To copy text from (say) Word into a PuTTY window, select the text and copy it in the normal way, switch to the PuTTY window, and press Shift-Insert.