Remote Access to Linux Machines

How to connect

You can connect to a Linux machine remotely in many different ways graphically as well as text based but using a secure shell is the most preferred method as the commands you send to the remote machine are encrypted for security.  Most of the Linux beginners may not be familiar with the SSH. It stands for Secure Shell. It is a secure form the telnet protocol. The transmission between both parties (i.e. Linux machine and the remote user) is encrypted.

Some of the common tools you can use for remote access include Putty and the WinSCP. Both are Windows based freely available SSH clients. They are truly much more than a simple SSH client. You can download Putty free of cost from www.putty.org and WinSCP is available at www.winscp.net .

Connect to a Linux box using Putty using Windows

In the next few steps you will be shown how you can use these both SSH clients from a Microsoft Windows based PC. We start with Putty.

1. First of all download Putty from the website given above for your Windows or Linux Machine (remember that Putty is also available for Linux based clients).
2. You don’t need to install it like the other software in Microsoft Widows. Just run it and you will be shown the following interface.
3. Now you just need to put in your Linux machine IP address and click the “Open” button. This is the simplest way you can use Putty to access a remote Linux machine.
4. Similarly after you install and run WinSCP, the interface is shown as follows:

1. Again here you can enter the IP address along with the login credentials. In Putty you enter the login credentials inside the shell.
2. The advantage of WinSCP is that you can easily copy data from your machine to the remote host and vice versa in a very simple way.
3. After you have connected to remote Linux machine you can do a lot more than you can do with a simple GUI.