Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Useful Utilities - Secure Communications

I'm going to date myself with this post, but back when I was in college protocols like telnet, FTP, and HTTP were huge (HTTP was big although it was nowhere near what it is today).  Heck, even gopher was big.  Anyway, back then security was less of a concern than it is today.  From what I've noticed these older protocols are being used less in favor of their secure counterparts SSH, SFTP, and HTTPS.  Unless your Internet browser is 10 years old you have an HTTPS program.  But what about SSH and SFTP.  Last time I checked Windows did not include either an SSH or SFTP program, so that means you'll need to download them.  Below are the best programs I've found for these tasks.

SSH: Putty - The Putty web page looks old, it totally looks like a college student who just discovered HTML and created "my first web page."  But Putty is a great program.  It's a great telnet/SSH client, very simple, and has lots of features.

SFTP: WinSCP -There are a ton of SFTP programs out there.  I've downloaded and tried a lot of them and I think WinSCP is the best.  It's not the best FTP program I've used, there are some quirks with the UI - but it is the best SFTP program I've seen.  So if you need an SFTP client give WinSCP a try.

Speaking of FTP, I think my favorite FTP client would be LeechFTP.  This program had a great interface, very fast multithreaded transfers, etc.  Unfortunately the author of LeechFTP stopped working on it and it doesn't support SFTP.  But if you need a regular FTP client google "LeechFTP" and you'll find the last version.

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