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SSH Administration – Windows in a Unix World

System Mash-Up

Article from ADMIN 00/2010

By Ken Hess

If you're a Windows user, you need four essential tools to work in a heterogeneous environment: PuTTY, WinSCP, Xming, and Cygwin.

How are you supposed to maintain your sanity and your productivity in this crazy, mixed up, jumbled operating system abyss that's been thrust upon you to manage? The answer: A superb connectivity toolbox. Welcome to the world of heterogeneous connectivity. If you work in a standard corporate environment, you work in a heterogeneous environment. Within that environment, you have an array of Linux, Windows, Solaris, AIX, and HP-UX systems to which you must connect. Furthermore, you have almost every imaginable version of those operating systems lurking about in your data center. And likely, you have in your possession a corporate laptop conveniently loaded with Windows XP, Vista, or 7: You need an introduction to PuTTY and Xming and a short refresher on Cygwin.

Windows-to-Windows connectivity comes easily via Windows Terminal Services, but what about all of your Windows-to-Unix and Windows-to-Linux connectivity needs? They aren't met by Microsoft tools, so you have to seek out your own third-party utilities for your advanced connectivity requirements. If you don't already have corporate approved tools, and chances are very good that you don't, this introduction to three popular tools will soon equip you to handle any Unix or Linux flavor that's placed in your path.

X11 Forwarding

To begin, I'll look at X11 forwarding, which allows a system to forward its X protocol traffic to a remote system. The beauty of X11 forwarding is that you don't have to forward an entire desktop environment. Instead, you run a single application or multiple applications from a single host. To forward the X protocol to a remote host, allow this with the command