PuTTY and SSH Glossary
Overview
Welcome to the PuTTY and SSH Glossary section of Putty.info—an independent educational site about PuTTY and SSH for Windows operators.
Independent resource: Putty.info is not affiliated with, operated by, sponsored by, or endorsed by the official PuTTY project. We never host PuTTY binaries. Prefer the project's own download page and documentation.
Use the child guides for procedures; use this page to orient, choose the right tool (GUI session, PuTTYgen, Pageant, PSCP, PSFTP, or Plink), and jump to verification or troubleshooting when something fails.
Topic map
Start here depending on your goal:
Recommended learning path
Suggested path for new operators:
- Start from official downloads if your client provenance is unclear.
- Learn sessions and host-key verification before advanced tunnels.
- Introduce keys with PuTTYgen and Pageant once basic login works.
- Add PSCP/PSFTP for file movement with the same credentials model.
- Review security guides quarterly and after personnel changes.
Operational notes
Each child page is written to stand alone with concrete UI panel names and warnings. Cross-link liberally, but keep production changes ticketed. Putty.info does not host binaries and is not affiliated with the official PuTTY project.
Putty.info pages are educational. They are not a substitute for change control on production firewalls, IAM, or sshd_config.
Field notes and runbook extras
Additional operational depth for PuTTY and SSH Glossary (path /glossary/): treat every change to authentication, forwarding, or host-key storage as a reversible change under change control. Record the PuTTY version string from Help → About, the Windows build, and whether Pageant was running. Those three facts explain a surprising fraction of “it works on my laptop” discrepancies.
When documenting the procedure for teammates, include: the saved session name, Host Name and Port from the Session panel, whether Connection type is SSH, the username, whether a PPK path is set under Connection → SSH → Auth, and whether agent forwarding is enabled. Explicitly state that Putty.info is an independent educational site and that binaries must be obtained from the official project download page. Link readers to safe download guidance, host key verification, and the official manual so they can cross-check labels that differ slightly across releases.
If you still need more diagnostics after following the sections above, reproduce the issue with logging enabled under Session → Logging to a local file you control, scrub secrets from the transcript, and compare against server auth logs for the same UTC timestamp. Avoid third-party “PuTTY fix” utilities. Prefer updating to the current stable release from official hosts, re-importing a known-good saved session, and testing from a second network path before declaring the workstation broken.
- Keep private keys passphrase-protected and backed up offline according to your organization's secret-handling policy.
- Prefer named saved sessions over ad-hoc connections for anything beyond a one-off debug.
- Disable unused tunnels and agent forwarding by default; enable them per session only when required.
- Schedule periodic key rotation and remove stale authorized_keys entries during access reviews.
- Teach new operators the difference between connection errors and authentication errors before giving them production bastion access.