PuTTY: Suggested Settings
There are additional options that you can set up with PuTTY to make your use of VU's shell a bit more exciting. You can create tunnels to different private services available only within the VU network, set up a passwordless SSH key, change PuTTY's behavior, etc. Most importantly, you can save your settings so that you only have to type them in once. We show here what we believe to be useful settings.
Creating a new session
Type in the users.vu.union.edu host name, and assign a name to this new PuTTY session.
Fast Full-Screen Mode
Sometimes it's useful to be able to quickly fill the whole screen with the terminal.
Automatically use your User Name
PuTTY can automatically send your user name when connecting to VU. This is especially useful when using SSH keys.
Forward X11
This is useful if you want to take advantage of X11 (graphical) programs on the users system. You will need to install a local X server for this to work. (We recommend using the X11 server that comes distributed with Cygwin---it's free and works well).
Tunnel MySQL
If you maintain a website that uses the MySQL server on web.vu.union.edu, you can tunnel a connection to it to your local machine, to use a MySQL client like HeidiSQL to access the database. The alternative is to use the command-line mysql client via the shell, which not everyone likes.
Tunnel Samba
It is possible to use Windows Networking to access your Virtual U file storage space while off-campus. You will need to tunnel a connection to the Samba server to your local machine. Please review Jan Keijser's article on how to do this, since you need to set up a special loopback device on your machine in addition to setting up the tunnel.
Tunnel VU IRC
VU's IRC server is only available from within the internal VU network. However, if you'd like to use a different IRC client to connect to it (say, a graphical one versus connecting via irssi), you may tunnel the port to your local machine.
Save your settings!
Be sure to save your settings into the Virtual U session.
Opening the session
Now when you open the Virtual U session, you will connect using all the settings that you saved earlier.
