Loading keys automatically with Pageant on Windows.

For those who work remotely on Linux from a Windows machine, they are probably familiar with the PuTTY set of tools for SSH connection management.

For managing keys in the PuTTY client you use pageant which, by default, when you open it will not load any keys. This is easily fixed just by creating a shortcut to the actual pageant program and in the box labelled 

"Target" you should see the path to the executable in double quotes. To load a key automatically when you click this shortcut, just type the full path to the key that you wish to load after the quotes. To add more than one key give a space separated list of full paths to each key you wish to load. 

Here are a couple of examples:

"C:\Program Files (x86)\PuTTY\pageant.exe" D:\SSH\mykey.ppk
The above will load the key "mykey.ppk" when you click on the shortcut.

"C:\Program Files (x86)\PuTTY\pageant.exe" D:\SSH\mykey1.ppk D:\SSH\mykey2.ppk D:\SSH\mykey3.ppk
The above will load the three keys when run from the shortcut.

As an added bonus, you could even place the shortcut in the startup start menu folder to have pageant start up on boot with all your keys loaded. Hopefully this saves someone some time. :)

SFTP Integration with Windows Explorer

I've come to notice that I very rarely use FTP for file transfers and have turned to using SFTP (FTP over SSH) instead for the two following reasons:
First, it is one less bit of software that I need to manage for my servers and second it is more secure. While I generally use Filezilla for most of my general purpose file transfer needs, I have also come across a nice little shell extension that integrates with Windows Explorer called Swish.

With Swish, you are able to log in to your servers through SSH either using password authentication, or through key authentication using pageant key manager. Upon logging in, you are able to navigate through your directories and files directly from Windows Explorer.

While it's a very useful and nice-to-have application, it is still in alpha. For the most part, I have not noticed any major errors that make it a shaky program to have. I think it's really worth a shot. Check it out at the Swish SFTP Homepage.