If you use Putty on a daily basis or have only encountered it in the CCIE lab exam then you will know what a great tool it is. Simple and effective (with no tabs!) Most people though may not use putty on a daily basis preferring something like SecureCRT so will not be familiar with changing putty settings. Here are a few of my putty tips and tricks.
In this short blog post I will go through some of the changes I make to my putty client.
When you are sitting the CCIE Lab exam you have 8 hours in front of a different keyboard, mouse and monitor.
You won’t have your favourite vertical mouse in the lab!
You want to try and make the experience as familiar as possible, well you can’t change the mouse or keyboard or monitor, but what you can change is the putty settings. The most annoying one for me was to always have the putty client on top.
This meant any diagrams always popped up behind the putty, I like to have a window come to the front when I click on it.
If you go into putty and change a few settings and then save to the default all new windows will adopt the settings.
Putty Tips and Tricks – 1
Ensure the window is always on top – or not?
If you right click on the top of your putty window and then select change settings you will get this window.
If you untick this box your putty windows will not remain on top. And any window you click will come over the top of the putty.
Putty Tips and Tricks – 2
Change the font and behaviour when window is maximised.
The next one for me is the font size and colour, I was always a green on black guy up until a few weeks ago when I converted to white on an off black.
To change the font and colour settings click on appearance and then under font settings click Change.
My font settings are now Courier New – Regular – Size 14
Click OK and then we have one more setting to change which is the font colour and the background.
If you click on the Colours option under Window you have many options – but the two we are interested in is Default Foreground and Default Background.
My default foreground colour is set to White – which is 255 / 255 / 255
I then set the background to an off black – which is 51 / 51 / 51
This will give you a window that looks like this
This is much easier on my eyes and makes reading the output a lot easier.
Now there is one more tweak that you can choose to do or not which is to Change the Font size when the window is resized.
The only problem with this setting is that when the window is normal the font is unreadable, so there is one other setting, which I now use.
Change font size only when maximised.
It is under the Window Settings.
What this does is when you maximise the window the font size goes huge! This is the entire full screen of my monitor!
This comes in really handy when you are trying to spot a very small difference between a configuration.
Once you restore the window back to its normal size the font returns to 14
So once you have made these changes, simply go to session and ensure Default Settings is saved and then Click on Save.
In the lab exam I put all my putty windows to the top left of the screen exactly on top of each other, then by clicking the icon on the taskbar I make the required one come to the front.
I also suggest you practice running putty on an XP machine and get yourself a Logitech K120 keyboard and an old crappy Dell Mouse!
I also change the font size in notepad as well to 14 which makes it a lot easier to read.
These setting might not suit you, but I am getting odler and my eyesight is changing! Every little helps!
Good Luck with your studies and I hope this post helps someone.
Roger
Hi i just want to confirm one thing i am going for second attempt soon i am wondering its possible to set up parameters universally for all sessions or not bec in my first attempt small font sucks a lot on screen even u r good with u r eye sight so i just need to confirm is there any way we can set parameters for all sessions we open i think cisco have default profile need to change by going in putty directory in c drive or may be on desktop wherever they store them
You need to change each session indvidually, should not take more than a few minutes
Hey Roger!
This didn’t work out for me in the lab.. although i saved my adapted profile to “default”, it didn’t work when opening other putty sessions…so don’t be suprised when it is not working and you manually need to adjust the settings to every putty window!
Best regards,
Dang
Hi Dang,
To be honest, I am sure last time I changed each session separately and then left it open for the rest of the day.
Was just looking at various methods to make the setup quicker. I know it’s not a big thing but last time I didn’t want to waste a single second not doing the lab, next time I am going to be a lot more relaxed and focussed.
Hey mate, the terminal used in the mobile lab in Berlin had no option to stop the window being on top of everything else, hope you have a better experience!
Sounds like your doing well :o)
Yes Lee, I think my post was a bit in-correct – I have now ammended it. You cannot make any changes except colours and fonts to individual sessions.
I just put them all top left on top of each other and selected them via the taskbar – worked very well
Roger That!
hey there Roger,
i tried your suggestions. didn’t work for me. i thought i could do this as a template for all putty sessions. not.
anyway cheers, i didn’t pass, but this time i won’t blame you. hhahhaahaha
Yes, I now know you cannot do anything with the putty default settings, so each session has to be tweaked individually, which shouldn’t take you more than a few minutes.
Not really relevant to the exam, but for day to day life at work I use mRemoteNG.
It’s just putty, rdp and a few other tools, but wrapped in a nice tabbed connection manager.