PortaPuTTY - Why's and How's

Why is it necessary to use PortaPuTTY?

Windows does not natively support Secure Shell connections, so a third-party program is necessary to establish a secure connection to the UMUC servers. Fortunately it is licensed as open source software and provided for free. If you want to read more, see the next section. Otherwise, simply follow the steps in the previous section to install UMUC's customized version of PortaPuTTY.

This is neat - How was it built?

This project was built from the following freely available, open source projects:

• It couldn't have gotten off the ground without the initial PuTTY program written by Simon Tatham, open-source software engineer.

• Bryan L. Fordham, open-source software engineer, modified the original PuTTY program to allow session profiles to be preserved in a subfolder rather than within the Windows registry, and provides a hacked version of PuTTY, lovingly named PortaPuTTY.

• Unfortunately, Bryan's version of PortaPuTTY stored the session identifiers in a folder called .putty, and the Windows operating system does not handle folder names that start with a period very well - sometimes the installation would work, and other times it would refuse to create the .putty folder. The quick and dirty solution was to edit the binary file putty.exe with a hex editor and search for and replace the string .putty with cputty. Then the session folder (and to reduce confusion, the putty.exe itself) was renamed to cputty.

• NSIS was used to create a Windows installer, which provided the ability to turn a few standalone files and folders into an installation package.

• HM NIS Edit provided an easy method to edit and compile the NSIS script.

• Finally, our Marketing department created the UMUC cupola icons to personalize the installation program.

 

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