Installing PuTTY on Windows

What is PuTTY?

PuTTY is (among other things) a free of SSH for Windows. I use PuTTy primarily as a method of communicating between my Windows workstation and Linux installations on VMs in VirtualBox.

This article is part of the Hadoop Masterpage.


The purpose of SSH is to create a secure channel across an insecure network. SSH is an asymmetric encryption protocol. This means there are two keys. The public key will encrypt data, and can be disseminated to the world. The private key is used to decrypt data and must be kept hidden at all times.

Where do I download PuTTY?

I start at the official team site here:

http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html

And for this article, I’ve selected version 0.63.

PSCP is the putty version of scp which is a cp (copy) over ssh command.


 

Uploading Files

The use I will be describing in this article is to communicate from a Windows host device to a Linux Virtual Machine (VM), in this case, Ubuntu 14.04.

Find the IP address on your Linux installation:

 craigtrim@CVB:/usr/lib/apache/hadoop/2.5.2/bin$ ifconfig  
 eth0   Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 08:00:27:6f:e0:5d   
      inet addr:192.168.1.12 Bcast:192.168.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0  
      UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1  
      RX packets:2899 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0  
      TX packets:1696 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0  
      collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000   
      RX bytes:654302 (654.3 KB) TX bytes:600048 (600.0 KB)  
 lo    Link encap:Local Loopback   
      inet addr:127.0.0.1 Mask:255.0.0.0  
      UP LOOPBACK RUNNING MTU:65536 Metric:1  
      RX packets:815 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0  
      TX packets:815 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0  
      collisions:0 txqueuelen:0   
      RX bytes:100433 (100.4 KB) TX bytes:100433 (100.4 KB)  

In your windows command line, find the directory that the "pscp.exe" executable exists in.

The data I want to transfer exists in a temp directory on the c:/ drive of my Windows box, and I want to transfer this to a data sub-directory in my home directory in the Linux box.

I use this command to transfer all the files:

 $ pscp c:\temp\* craigtrim@192.168.x.y:/home/craigtrim/data  

The operational output is shown on the command line:

 0106363.txt        | 2 kB |  3.0 kB/s | ETA: 00:00:00 | 100%  
 0106364.txt        | 3 kB |  3.2 kB/s | ETA: 00:00:00 | 100%  
 0106365.txt        | 6 kB |  6.8 kB/s | ETA: 00:00:00 | 100%  
 0106366.txt        | 3 kB |  3.9 kB/s | ETA: 00:00:00 | 100%  
 0106367.txt        | 9 kB |  9.6 kB/s | ETA: 00:00:00 | 100%  
 0106368.txt        | 3 kB |  3.9 kB/s | ETA: 00:00:00 | 100%  

Downloading Files

Let's say I want to download the log files from my HDFS cluster on the NameNode.

This is similar to the command above, with the exception of the remote system being placed first, and my local system being placed last:

 $ pscp craigtrim@192.168.x.y:/usr/lib/apache/hadoop/2.5.2/logs/* c:/temp  

Note that the local directory structure will need to exist first.

It is also possible to pass the username and password into the command:

 $ pscp -l craigtrim -pw password 192.168.x.y:/usr/lib/apache/hadoop/2.5.2/logs/* c:\temp  
 hadoop-craigtrim-secondar | 39 kB | 39.1 kB/s | ETA: 00:00:00 | 100%  
 hadoop-craigtrim-namenode | 122 kB | 122.8 kB/s | ETA: 00:00:00 | 100%  
 yarn-craigtrim-resourcema | 36 kB | 36.1 kB/s | ETA: 00:00:00 | 100%  

Authomation

I have also found it helpful to create a batch file in Windows with the command above.

The path to the batch file can be placed in the PATH variable in System > Environment Variables.  The command can also be parameterized.  Once in the PATH, this command can be executed from any context in a given Windows Command session.

Alternatives to PuTTY

I prefer PuTTY, since the uploading / downloading can be easily automated from the command line. However, WinSCP provides a visual method for the same purpose.

References

1. http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/92715/can-i-transfer-files-using-sshfa
2. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21587036/using-putty-to-scp-from-windows-to-linux