Putty is a great SSH client and it’s my favorite.

Some day, I tried to find a way to login to remote server without entering password every time, and the solution went to Pub/Pri keys pair.

After some research, I got the idea: create private/public RSA keys pair on client machine, then send the public key to server and pend it to ~/.ssh/authorized_keys2, and then using the generated private key on client machine for remote login.

But the above solution is just the way for Linux host and Linux Server, for Windows host, we use Putty as client normally.

Putty bundled keys generation tool names PuttyGen.

Using PuttyGen, users can generate keys pair AND convert keys format. Why conversion? Because keys generated by OpenSSH ssh-keygen and keys generated by PuttyGen are different format, OpenSSH can’t using the keys from PuttyGen.

So the solution for Windows host is generating keys pair using PuttyGen, convert the generated public key to OpenSSH format and do the other things same to Linux way. Putty will work fluently. BINGO!

Another issue was found on NetBeans 6.8B. I use NB for PHP projects development, and I really more appreciate the way of NetBeans than the way of Eclipse. For PHP projects, Eclipse is overworking solution.

A great feature of NetBeans is that it can auto sync files with server by ftp/sftp. Great for web developers.

But not like putty client, NB’s sftp module based on OpenSSH, so the way for NetBeans auto-sync by sftp should goes to Linux OpenSSH, not PuttyGen.

The final tip on this ssh/sftp topic is: Putty’s private key is putty’s format, but Netbeans’ is OpenSSH format, for other client, figure out the format by searching the help manual first.