With SSH being the protocol of choice for connecting to systems and Windows not even installing a telnet client by default, its time to find a way to remotely manage routers, switches, etc. A popular choice is the free Telnet/SSH client called Putty (http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/). It runs on Windows and Unix systems but it’s really basic, especially on Microsoft systems.
On Unix and Linux systems you can use the terminal and open up multiple tabs with several different remote connections. That is a very handy feature that I have used many times. Often there will be several open connections at once and with configurations being copied from one router to another. So what is the solution for the SysAdmin on a Windows box? The answer is Putty Connection Manager (http://puttycm.free.fr/cms/). After downloading the putty.exe file and placing on the local hard drive, Putty Connection Manager can be used as a very useful front end for managing connections. Just install Putty Connection Manager and let it know where the the Putty executable is. It works great when working on Cisco labs created with GNS3 or managing a production network. Once you create a database of connections, it’s possible to save them and categorize them by protocol (SSH or Telnet), location, device name, etc.
This screen shot gives an idea of how it works.
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