No need for PuTTY

I seem to be spending more and more time talking to command line interfaces (CLI) these days. I think this is because I’m messing around with the Raspberry Pi that controls my LED panel cube and I’ve left off the desktop interface because it slows things down.

For years my weapon of choice for getting a command prompt on a remote system has been the PyTTY program. But no more. Later versions of Windows PowerShell for Windows 10 have an ssh command that just works. I found this lovely blog post from Scott Hanselman that shows how to create keys that let you connect without needing to enter a password. I’m especially impressed with the cunning way that he pushes the key file from the PC to the remote device.

Last night at the Hardware Meetup I discovered that you can use the ssh command to connect to a remote system without needing to know the ip address of the target machine. This meant that I was able to use the mobile hotspot in my phone to give a network connection to my Surface Pro and my Raspberry Pi and then use:

ssh pi@raspberrypi

.. to get a command line on the Pi. Very useful.