Saved Sessions in Putty: How to save a session without the logon credentials
We cannot log into Putty directly. We have to go through CA PAM.
Our Putty connections log us off after about 5 minutes of non-use.
Our CA PAM sessions log us off every 4 hours, or so, with or without use.
Yes, it’s frustrating.
But what I want to do is use Putty’s Saved Sessions feature to save font size, background color and other Appearance settings.
I do not wish to have, for example, a “Yellow_Session” Saved Session that appies to a specific server. I wish to be able to apply those saved session settings to any server.
I can get this feature to work marginally.
I say, “marginally” because in order for me to get it to work, I have to log on to the server through Putty, configure the Putty session to look the way I want it to, then save that session under the appropriate title. From there on – for the duration of the CA PAM session – I can use the Saved Session feature.
This is helpful, because as I mentioned, our system logs us out of Putty after about 5 minutes of non-use.
So if we go get coffee, when we come back, we’ve been logged out.
Using the Saved Session feature in this case, is definitely helpful.
However, as soon as CA PAM logs off, I have to start over with my Saved Sessions in Putty, from scratch. So at a minimum, I’m recreating all my Saved Sessions in Putty twice a day.
What I am looking for is the possibility of saving session settings, without the server credentials being attached to the Saved Session metadata.
Is this possible?
If I try to open a Saved Session before logging on to the server, making all the Appearance changes manually and saving the session once again, I get an error that says, “Network Error: Connection refused”.
From there I cannot proceed. I have to close the Putty window, open a new Putty window through CA PAM and then proceed to log on to the server, make the Appearance setting changes manually and save the session under the appropriate title (Yellow_Session, Blue_Session, Green_Session, etc.). As long as CA PAM stays active in the current CA PAM session, all is well. As soon as I lose my CA PAM session, it’s back to Ground Zero.
Once the twice-daily manual work is done, I can apply any Saved Session to any server, by simply opening the Saved Session, having it log me on to the server associated with that Saved Sesssion, and me from there logging on to whatever server I wish. In this respect, I can apply Saved Sessions to any server, albeit that it is an indirect method. Which is fine. No complaints about that. This is a trivial and non-consequential level of indirectness.
I think what I’m looking for is a Saved Session that doesn’t tie the server credentials to the Saved Session profile, so I don’t have to do all the manual work of saving session settings manually at least twice a day.
Thank you.
