The Almighty Useful program.

This blog post is on two things, putty commander and how much we love putty.

Okay so here at Crucial, we have many needs for using Putty.

1. Aaron likes Windows.
2. Because he likes windows, I need to use Putty.
3. We have a lot of Linux machines.
4. CMD is possibly the biggest hunk of crap on the face of the planet.

So we love Putty (and when I say we love putty, if I could mould it into my future wife, you know I’d not be writing this post right now)

We really love putty. <3

Everyday, everyone in the office is using putty (except aaron and Ijan)

• Jada’s (Operations / Datacenter) configuring new load balancers and web cluster
• Scott and Ross (Operations / Engineering) are working on new Hypervisor clusters and other bits
• Vikram and Daniel (Technical) are working on clients servers because they decided to no longer work!
• Hendrik and Andrew (Accounts / Sales) are doing cPanel installations for clients.
• and Myself, I’m programming with a whole bunch of VIM screens in putty, hell here’s a photo of my screens as of writing this blog post:

I love Putty. <3

But you know what really grinds my gears? Putting the same commands into eight putty terminals because your busy configuring clusters or doing standard updates to a whole range of servers!

When you do this, it inherently leads to:

• Tiredness
• Self loathing and hatred
• Cramped fingers
• Hostile work environments
• Innate urges to lookup kitlers
• Mistakes in your codez & configurations.

So have no fear, I found a solution, it’s called Putty Commander!

Putty commander allows you to interact with multi putty windows at once allowing you to:

• Send the same commands
• Organize window structure
• Sort by filtering certain window groups.

It’s an amazing and simple program that will allow you to avoid all of the above problems (Except if your like me, I still look up Kitlers)

I’ve attached the PuttyCS on this blog post because actually after googling it, I found like three sites that tried to give me a virus instead!

Download PuTTYCS here!

Quick tip on putty commander, using the filter:
When using the filter, we can group commonalities together – the trick it, puttyCS looks for the TITLE of the putty screen, so usually if your SSH’d to something, it’ll be like: karl@myawesomeserver:~

You can include, exclude like so:

1.  Include is given by +myTitleText;
2.  Excludeis given by -myTitalText;

you can wildcard using either * or ?, I’ll give an example.
Say I have webservers myawesomeserver1 myawesomeserver2 myawesomeserver3 myawesomeserver4
I can setup the following filter:
+karl@myawesomeserver*
This will trigger all those windows, but no other ones.

Pretty awesome huh?

enjoy!

–Karl.