For developers and system administrators, it’s a necessity to frequently log on to Linux servers from a Windows computer. Unlike Linux OS, Windows does not have a native ssh client. Putty is the most used freeware ssh client for Windows OS. It supports telnet and ssh protocols. One constraint with Putty is that it does not have support for tabbed windows. Putty Connection manager is developed to solve this problem but it has got lot of issues in using the utility. In this post, I am going to write about Terminals, the best Ssh freeware client in my opinion
Terminals supports not just telnet and ssh but also RDP, VNC and RAS connections. This utility can be downloaded from codeplex site.
What are the things you can do with Terminals?
- You can save login id and password of the remote servers and by single click you can connect to the server.
- You can create a group of servers and with single click you can open connections to all the servers added to the group.
- You can save multiple user credentials for the same server and can select the user name while connecting to the server.
- You can save connections while closing Terminals and you can reopen the connections automatically when you restart Terminals.
- There are other features like ping, netstat, whois, DNS lookup, Wake on LAN.
Configuring Terminals to connect to ssh servers.
Download SetupTerminals.msi package from the above link and install it on your computer. You need to have .NET framework 3.5 or higher version otherwise you can’t install Terminals. You can install it from this link. .NET 3.5 package for Windows.
You can create a new server connection from File -> New Connection. Select the protocol(ssh or telnet etc) and enter server login details and select ‘Save password’. Click on connect button and it will open the connection with remote server. The server entry will also be saved in the drop down box provided in the toolbar so that you can easily make connections to the server with a single click.
Creating group of servers
You can create servers group from Groups -> Organize groups. You can connect to all the servers in a group at once by clicking on Groups in the toolbar and then clicking on the group name.