When you are in full-screen mode, you can still access the system menu if you click the left mouse button in the extreme top left corner of the screen. 3.2 Creating a log file of your session For some purposes you may find you want to log everything that appears on your screen. You can do this using the ‘Logging’ panel in the configuration box.
To begin a session log, select ‘Change Settings’ from the system menu and go to the Logging panel. Enter a log file name, and select a logging mode. (You can log all session output including the terminal control sequences, or you can just log the printable text. It depends what you want the log for.) Click ‘Apply’ and your log will be started. Later on, you can go back to the Logging panel and select ‘Logging turned off completely’ to stop logging; then PuTTY will close the log file and you can safely read it. 3.3 Altering your character set configuration If you find that special characters (accented characters, for example, or line-drawing characters) are not being displayed correctly in your PuTTY session, it may be that PuTTY is interpreting the characters sent by the server according to the wrong character set. There are a lot of different character sets available, so it's entirely possible for this to happen. If you click ‘Change Settings’ and look at the ‘Translation’ panel, you should see a large number of character sets which you can select, and other related options. Now all you need is to find out which of them you want! (See section 4.10
for more information.) 3.4 Using X11 forwarding in SSH The SSH protocol has the ability to securely forward X Window System graphical applications over your encrypted SSH connection, so that you can run an application on the SSH server machine and have it put its windows up on your local machine without sending any X network traffic in the clear. In order to use this feature, you will need an X display server for your Windows machine, such as Cygwin/X, X-Win32, or Exceed. This will probably install itself as display number 0 on your local machine; if it doesn't, the manual for the X server should tell you what it does do. You should then tick the ‘Enable X11 forwarding’ box in the X11 panel (see section 4.24
) before starting your SSH session. The ‘X display location’ box is blank by default, which means that PuTTY will try to use a sensible default such as :0, which is the usual display location where your X server will be installed. If that needs changing, then change it. Now you should be able to log in to the SSH server as normal. To check that X forwarding has been successfully negotiated during connection startup, you can check the PuTTY Event Log (see section 3.1.3.1
). It should say something like this: 2001-12-05 17:22:01 Requesting X11 forwarding
2001-12-05 17:22:02 X11 forwarding enabled
If the remote system is Unix or Unix-like, you should also be able to see that the DISPLAY environment variable has been set to point at display 10 or above on the SSH server machine itself: fred@unixbox:~$ echo $DISPLAY
unixbox:10.0
If this works, you should then be able to run X applications in the remote session and have them display their windows on your PC.
For more options relating to X11 forwarding, see section 4.24
. 3.5 Using port forwarding in SSH The SSH protocol has the ability to forward arbitrary network (TCP) connections over your encrypted SSH connection, to avoid the network traffic being sent in clear. For example, you could use this to connect from your home computer to a POP-3 server on a remote machine without your POP-3 password being visible to network sniffers.