Newbie Tutorial: How to connect trough telnet/ssh

It may become necessary at some point for you to access your UNIX accounts from home or another machine. I have written a small and hopefully useful tutorial for using PuTTY in Windows to login to a remote session on the telnet/ssh server.

Downloading PuTTY
You can download PuTTY freely from

Connecting with PuTTY
After downloading PuTTY, you can double-click and run putty.exe. This will produce a session configuration window like shown below.


You will want to type in the hostname of a telnet or ssh machine and select the telnet or SSH protocol. Note that you can save your settings to make it easier to connect to machines in the future by typing a session name in the Saved Sessions text field and selecting save.

Before connecting you should also make sure the backspace key is mapped properly as shown below.


After doing this you should return to the previous screen and save your session again if necessary.

After selecting your host and protocol, click on open. This will connect you to the server and ask if you want to accept the RSA key of the server.


You will want to select yes. After doing this, whenever you connect to the same server with PuTTY, it will use that key to identify the server and alert you if it is not the same.

Logging in to Your UNIX Account
After accepting the RSA key from the server, PuTTY will ask you to input your username, this is the login name you use to the UNIX system. Type it in and press the "enter" key.


PuTTY will then ask for your UNIX password, type that in and press the "enter" key. Note, that your password will not be shown.

At this point, you should be logged into the system. You should be able to run any non-graphical commands at this point like javac and ls. Although graphical Emacs will not work in this mode, consider an editor like pico or if your feeling adventurous vim. There is even a web browser called lynx that can be used somwhat like Mozilla's navigator.