I was sick of typing in username/password for each login (I’m currently working on XP, deploying to a Linux-only env), so I finally went through the pain of following the steps here and set up PuTTY/Peagant public key authentication.

It was a relatively painless setup process, but here are a couple of things to keep in mind when going through it:

  • PuTTY is a pain to update/navigate as you have to remember to load/save during each setting update
  • You can “pre-enter” your remote username by setting “username@hostname” as the hostname
  • authorized_keys file on the remote box should have a mask of 600
  • putty.exe -load “session_name” allows you to create PuTTY shorcuts for each of your connections