Sunday, July 22, 2012

Chaning default putty configuration (English)

Formatting preserved. Short extract. Order is changed

Category: Window
Lines of scrollback: 20000
Reset scrollback on keypress: Checked
Reset scrollback on display activity: Unchecked

Category: Window > Translation
Character set: UTF-8
Handling of line drawing characters: Unicode

Category: Window > Colours
ANSI Blue: Red:74 Green:74 Blue:255
ANSI Blue Bold: Red:140: Green:140 Blue:255

Category: Connection
Seconds between keepalives (0 to turn off): 25

Category: Connection > SSH > X11
Enable X11 forwarding: enabled


Finally, saving the default.
Now, don't forget to save the changes you just made to the default template. If you loaded the Default Settings at the start, return back to Category: Session and press the Save button. Now you are done !

There is expaning explanation below.
Ниже есть продолжение.

Increase scrollback buffer.
By default Putty buffers 200 lines of output, which is too little in lots of circumstances. And the moment you actually need this number increased, chances are you already lost some information you wanted. So it is wise to increase this number. What I do is go to Category: Window and increase Lines of scrollback to 20000.

Use proper character encoding.
Nowadays all Linux systems are able to use Unicode (UTF-8) so to make sure that the output in Putty (especially everything non-ascii) looks fine, go to Category: Window > Translation and change the character set to UTF-8, make sure that also the line drawing characters use Unicode as well.

Change dark colours on a black background.
One of the more annoying things with terminal applications (xterm has the same issue) is that by default dark-blue is too dark to be visible on a black background. Not only is this frustrating, it makes the experience for new users so bad that they prefer to disable colours (or hate the ls colour output or syntax highlighting in vim).

So if you are like me, go to Category: Window > Colours and select ANSI Blue in the Select a colour to adjust to Red:74 Green:74 Blue:255. I do the same for ANSI Blue Bold to Red:140 Green:140 Blue:255.


Keeping idle sessions active.
Another frustrating problem is induced by the time-to-live of inactive or idle TCP sessions on firewall or switch configurations. At some companies this is put aggressively low so that TCP sessions that have no activity for 1 minute or even 30 seconds are being dropped. If you are using an SSH connection over such a network device, you have to take care to send keep-alive packets over your idle session. To do this go to Category: Connection and set Seconds between keepalives (0 to turn off) to 25.

Enable X11 forwarding.

Together with Xming, Putty allows you to run graphical Linux applications on your Windows system, so enabling X11 forwarding by default can be useful. To enable this, got to: Connection > SSH > X11 and enable Enable X11 forwarding.

Also dynamic forwarding is very useful to connect to systems on a remote network, even when you do not know in advance having it enabled can be useful. This option however reserves a local port on the system so enabling it by default is not really practical. However you can still enable it from a running Putty by selecting Change settings.
http://dag.wieers.com/blog/content/improving-putty-settings-on-windows

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