Getting ssh programs for your computer

Table of Contents:

ssh programs are available for all operating systems.

For Classic Macintosh computers running MacOS versions 8 and 9, the free Nifty Telnet ssh client program is available to do remote logins.

Stanford has site-licensed the Fetch program for encrypted remote file transfer on Classic Macs and MacOS X.

MacOS X has the normal Unix ssh, scp, and sftp programs built-in. You can run them as described in these pages in command line mode from the Terminal application (found in the folder Applications/Utilities). You can use Fetch (above) for a Graphical User Interface (GUI) for file transfer. You can also find shareware GUI front-ends for ssh and scp programs by searching VersionTracker if you really don't want to use the command line.

For Windows PCs, Stanford has site-licensed the SecureCRT ssh program for remote logins and the SecureFX sftp program for file transfers.

Many Unix or Linux computers come with the OpenSSH distribution, including the ssh server and the ssh, scp, and sftp programs. If your Unix or Linux systems does not have these programs, Stanford maintains pre-compiled versions of the OpenSSH ssh server and client software for many different versions of Unix. Stanford adds patches to the normal distribution to make sure ssh will work correctly with the AFS distributed file system, and to allow login via kerberos credentials (SUNet ID) in some circumstances.

Stanford computers, including pangea and the Sweet Hall workstations, run version 2 of the ssh protocol. This version fixes known security problems with the original version 1 and adds the sftp protocol for file transfer. Pangea and the Sweet Hall workstations will also accept version 1 connections from older ssh client programs.

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