At one time or another, you will probably want to be able to access your Linux machine from a computer running Windows. While I am sure there are many ways to do this, the simplest would be to use the ssh daemon that comes set-up and configured on most Linux installations.

Windows, on the the other hand, does not have native support for this type of connection and the end user must turn to 3rd party utilities in order for a connection to be made. Two such utilities that seem to work quite well for me are WinSCP and Putty. Not only do both of these utilities work very good independently, they compliment each other very well.

With Putty, users have the ability to connect to a remote machine using a command line interface. Other aspects include sftp abilities for secure file transfers and the puttygen program that I have referenced before.

WinSCP also allows the user to connect to a remote machine using the ssh protocol, but in more of an FTP client fashion. The files and directories on the remote machine are on the right and the files and directories of the local machine are on the left. WinSCP also gives users the ability to directly view or edit files that are on the remote machine by downloading a copy to a temporary directory and then uploading any changes that are made.

They compliment each other very well because WinSCP has the ability to authenticate using a key made with the puttygen program and also has a menu option to open the current session in Putty. This works very well if you have just modified a configuration file and need to restart the process that uses that given configuration.

I’m sure there are other utilities out that that can perform these same functions, but these two seem to work quite well for me…and I can carry them on my flash drive to use wherever I may be. I would however, like to find a WinSCP type program that I can run on another Linux machine (Putty’s abilities are all already built in to Linux).