When you’re forced to work on a Unix infrastructure on a Windows desktop, the very first tool you want is an ssh client. I’ve long used PuTTY for this. It’s an excellent tool and has all the bells and whistles that I need: certificate management, port forwarding, configurable terminal, screen support, etc. It has a couple of quirks that I don’t like, the most notable being that it stores its saved settings in the registry so it’s difficult to move saved settings from one machine to another. That’s not a show stopper, but as I’ve expanded my Windows work lately it became a real annoyance. I’ve been configuring multiple Windows machines for sys admin work and having to reenter the servers on every machine is a pain.

I took a look around at the state of Windows ssh tools and found a couple that looked really nice. I played around with them and enjoyed things like separate configuration files that are easily transportable. Some had built in scp clients. All were good, solid tools.

But I’m back to PuTTY. Despite not being updated since early 2007, PuTTY is still a solid tool. It’s memory footprint is small. It’s easy to install. It’ll run in a standalone USB key environment. There’s now a Linux version, though I’ve not used it. It just works. Every time. With no futzing about. It’s old, stodgy and very, very reliable. It is the best ssh client for Windows.

Two additional points: if you need scp, the PuTTY scp client works, but it’s not got a lot of features. Try WinSCP instead. Secondly, when is Microsoft going to get with the program and put an ssh client directly into the Windows shell? Being able to run “ssh -l 8080:remote:8080 -X somemachine.com” directly from the command line is, for me, more intuitive and easier to do. One of the drawbacks of being a crotchety old Unix admin.