PuTTY: Using an SSH Key
You can use an SSH key to connect to VU without having to use a password. This is a feature that is available to all SSH clients; we will show how it's done in Windows using PuTTY.
On Mac OS X, you can just run ssh-keygen -t rsa from the terminal, and paste the data within your resulting $HOME/.ssh/id_rsa.pub file into your authorized_keys file on VU, as shown below).
Note: You only want to use this technique on your own personal computers. Never set up a passwordless login session on a public machine that is used by others.
Making the key with PuTTYgen
If you just downloaded PuTTY.exe and not the full PuTTY installer for Windows, then you will need to download puttygen.exe from the author's website. Otherwise, you should already have it on your computer. Start it up.
Saving the key
You will need to copy the generated "public key" into a file within your VU account, and save the "private key" into a file on your local machine.
You DO want a password-less key, so say YES.
Choose a location to save the key to. Name the PPK file something
appropriate, like "vu".
Adding the public key to your VU account
Open a PuTTY connection to VU as described in the basic getting on the shell page.
Then, follow the directions in this picture:
Using the Private Key in PuTTY
If you have an existing Virtual U session saved in PuTTY (see recommended settings), it may look something like so:
Navigate to the SSH -> Auth section, and press the "Browse" button:
Now, load the Private Key file that you saved earlier while using PuTTYgen:
Finally, save your Virtual U session, so that it will always use the Private Key file when you connect.
That's it. If you've set up PuTTY to auto-login with your username, then you can immediately connect to Virtual U's shell simply by opening the "Virtual U" session.