\S{faq-ssh2-keyfmt}{Question} Does PuTTY support reading OpenSSH or
\cw{ssh.com} SSH-2 private key files?
-PuTTY doesn't support this natively, but as of 0.53
+PuTTY doesn't support this natively (see
+\W{http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/wishlist/key-formats-natively.html}{the wishlist entry}
+for reasons why not), but as of 0.53
PuTTYgen can convert both OpenSSH and \cw{ssh.com} private key
files into PuTTY's format.
brought up to release quality.
There's also a third-party port at
-\W{http://pocketputty.duxy.net/}\c{http://pocketputty.duxy.net/}.
+\W{http://www.pocketputty.net/}\c{http://www.pocketputty.net/}.
\S{faq-win31}{Question} Is there a port to \i{Windows 3.1}?
\b The Unix/Gtk port is already fully working under Mac OS X as an X11
application.
-\b A native (Cocoa) Mac OS X port is in progress. It's just about
+\b A native (Cocoa) Mac OS X port has been started. It's just about
usable, but is of nowhere near release quality yet, and is likely to
-behave in unexpected ways.
+behave in unexpected ways. Currently it's unlikely to be completed
+unless someone steps in to help.
\b A separate port to the classic Mac OS (pre-OSX) is also in
progress; it too is not ready yet.
\H{faq-howto} HOWTO questions
+\S{faq-login}{Question} What login name / password should I use?
+
+This is not a question you should be asking \e{us}.
+
+PuTTY is a communications tool, for making connections to other
+computers. We maintain the tool; we \e{don't} administer any computers
+that you're likely to be able to use, in the same way that the people
+who make web browsers aren't responsible for most of the content you can
+view in them. \#{FIXME: less technical analogy?} We cannot help with
+questions of this sort.
+
+If you know the name of the computer you want to connect to, but don't
+know what login name or password to use, you should talk to whoever
+administers that computer. If you don't know who that is, see the next
+question for some possible ways to find out.
+
+\# FIXME: some people ask us to provide them with a login name
+apparently as random members of the public rather than in the
+belief that we run a server belonging to an organisation they already
+have some relationship with. Not sure what to say to such people.
+
\S{faq-commands}{Question} \I{commands on the server}What commands
can I type into my PuTTY terminal window?
-This is not a question you should be asking \e{us}. You need to read
-the manuals, or ask the administrator, of \e{the computer you have
-connected to}.
+Again, this is not a question you should be asking \e{us}. You need
+to read the manuals, or ask the administrator, of \e{the computer
+you have connected to}.
PuTTY does not process the commands you type into it. It's only a
communications tool. It makes a connection to another computer; it
create a Windows shortcut that invokes PuTTY with a command line
like
-\c \path\name\to\putty.exe -load mysession
+\c \path\name\to\putty.exe -load "mysession"
(Note: prior to 0.53, the syntax was \c{@session}. This is now
deprecated and may be removed at some point.)
accident, and cause unexpected changes in the window title. Don't do
it.
-\S{faq-password-fails}{Question} My keyboard stops working once
-PuTTY displays the password prompt.
+\S{faq-password-fails}{Question} My \i{keyboard} stops working once
+PuTTY displays the \i{password prompt}.
No, it doesn't. PuTTY just doesn't display the password you type, so
that someone looking at your screen can't see what it is.
your screen can't even tell how \e{long} your password is, which
might be valuable information.
-\S{faq-keyboard}{Question} One or more function keys don't do what I
-expected in a server-side application.
+\S{faq-keyboard}{Question} One or more \I{keyboard}\i{function keys}
+don't do what I expected in a server-side application.
If you've already tried all the relevant options in the PuTTY
Keyboard panel, you may need to mail the PuTTY maintainers and ask.
The simplest way to investigate this is to find some other terminal
environment, in which that function key \e{does} work; and then
investigate what sequence the function key is sending in that
-situation. One reasonably easy way to do this on a Unix system is to
-type the command \c{cat}, and then press the function key. This is
+situation. One reasonably easy way to do this on a \i{Unix} system is to
+type the command \i\c{cat}, and then press the function key. This is
likely to produce output of the form \c{^[[11~}. You can also do
this in PuTTY, to find out what sequence the function key is
producing in that. Then you can mail the PuTTY maintainers and tell
also remove the delays, but would lose a \e{lot} more security
still. We do not recommend it.)
+\S{faq-xpwontrun}{Question} PuTTY fails to start up. Windows claims that
+\q{the application configuration is incorrect}.
+
+This is caused by a bug in certain versions of \i{Windows XP} which is
+triggered by PuTTY 0.58. It can be avoided by installing
+Service Pack 2, by using a different version of PuTTY, or by installing
+a special \i{manifest file} alongside the PuTTY executable.
+The
+\W{http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/wishlist/xp-wont-run}{\q{xp-wont-run}}
+entry in PuTTY's wishlist has more details.
+
\H{faq-secure} Security questions
\S{faq-publicpc}{Question} Is it safe for me to download PuTTY and
\S{faq-permission}{Question} Can I have permission to put PuTTY on a
cover disk / distribute it with other software / etc?
-Yes. You need not bother asking us explicitly for permission. You
-already have permission. Redistribution of the unmodified PuTTY
-binary in this way is entirely permitted by our licence (see
-\k{licence}), and you are welcome to do it as much as you like.
-
-If you are distributing PuTTY within your own organisation, or for
-use with your own product, then we recommend (but do not insist)
-that you offer your own first-line technical support, to answer
-questions directly relating to the interaction of PuTTY with your
-particular environment. If your users mail us directly, we won't be
-able to give them very much help about things specific to your own
-setup.
+Yes. For most things, you need not bother asking us explicitly for
+permission; our licence already grants you permission.
+
+See \k{feedback-permission} for more details.
+
+\S{faq-indemnity}{Question} Can you sign an agreement indemnifying
+us against security problems in PuTTY?
+
+No!
+
+A vendor of physical security products (e.g. locks) might plausibly
+be willing to accept financial liability for a product that failed
+to perform as advertised and resulted in damage (e.g. valuables
+being stolen). The reason they can afford to do this is because they
+sell a \e{lot} of units, and only a small proportion of them will
+fail; so they can meet their financial liability out of the income
+from all the rest of their sales, and still have enough left over to
+make a profit. Financial liability is intrinsically linked to
+selling your product for money.
+
+There are two reasons why PuTTY is not analogous to a physical lock
+in this context. One is that software products don't exhibit random
+variation: \e{if} PuTTY has a security hole (which does happen,
+although we do our utmost to prevent it and to respond quickly when
+it does), every copy of PuTTY will have the same hole, so it's
+likely to affect all the users at the same time. So even if our
+users were all paying us to use PuTTY, we wouldn't be able to
+\e{simultaneously} pay every affected user compensation in excess of
+the amount they had paid us in the first place. It just wouldn't
+work.
+
+The second, much more important, reason is that PuTTY users
+\e{don't} pay us. The PuTTY team does not have an income; it's a
+volunteer effort composed of people spending their spare time to try
+to write useful software. We aren't even a company or any kind of
+legally recognised organisation. We're just a bunch of people who
+happen to do some stuff in our spare time.
+
+Therefore, to ask us to assume financial liability is to ask us to
+assume a risk of having to pay it out of our own \e{personal}
+pockets: out of the same budget from which we buy food and clothes
+and pay our rent. That's more than we're willing to give. We're
+already giving a lot of our spare \e{time} to developing software
+for free; if we had to pay our own \e{money} to do it as well, we'd
+start to wonder why we were bothering.
+
+Free software fundamentally does not work on the basis of financial
+guarantees. Your guarantee of the software functioning correctly is
+simply that you have the source code and can check it before you use
+it. If you want to be sure there aren't any security holes, do a
+security audit of the PuTTY code, or hire a security engineer if you
+don't have the necessary skills yourself: instead of trying to
+ensure you can get compensation in the event of a disaster, try to
+ensure there isn't a disaster in the first place.
+
+If you \e{really} want financial security, see if you can find a
+security engineer who will take financial responsibility for the
+correctness of their review. (This might be less likely to suffer
+from the everything-failing-at-once problem mentioned above, because
+such an engineer would probably be reviewing a lot of \e{different}
+products which would tend to fail independently.) Failing that, see
+if you can persuade an insurance company to insure you against
+security incidents, and if the insurer demands it as a condition
+then get our code reviewed by a security engineer they're happy
+with.
+
+\S{faq-permission-form}{Question} Can you sign this form granting us
+permission to use/distribute PuTTY?
+
+If your form contains any clause along the lines of \q{the
+undersigned represents and warrants}, we're not going to sign it.
+This is particularly true if it asks us to warrant that PuTTY is
+secure; see \k{faq-indemnity} for more discussion of this. But it
+doesn't really matter what we're supposed to be warranting: even if
+it's something we already believe is true, such as that we don't
+infringe any third-party copyright, we will not sign a document
+accepting any legal or financial liability. This is simply because
+the PuTTY development project has no income out of which to satisfy
+that liability, or pay legal costs, should it become necessary. We
+cannot afford to be sued. We are assuring you that \e{we have done
+our best}; if that isn't good enough for you, tough.
+
+The existing PuTTY licence document already gives you permission to
+use or distribute PuTTY in pretty much any way which does not
+involve pretending you wrote it or suing us if it goes wrong. We
+think that really ought to be enough for anybody.
+
+See also \k{faq-permission-general} for another reason why we don't
+want to do this sort of thing.
+
+\S{faq-permission-future}{Question} Can you write us a formal notice
+of permission to use PuTTY?
+
+We could, in principle, but it isn't clear what use it would be. If
+you think there's a serious chance of one of the PuTTY copyright
+holders suing you (which we don't!), you would presumably want a
+signed notice from \e{all} of them; and we couldn't provide that
+even if we wanted to, because many of the copyright holders are
+people who contributed some code in the past and with whom we
+subsequently lost contact. Therefore the best we would be able to do
+\e{even in theory} would be to have the core development team sign
+the document, which wouldn't guarantee you that some other copyright
+holder might not sue.
+
+See also \k{faq-permission-general} for another reason why we don't
+want to do this sort of thing.
+
+\S{faq-permission-general}{Question} Can you sign \e{anything} for
+us?
+
+Not unless there's an incredibly good reason.
+
+We are generally unwilling to set a precedent that involves us
+having to enter into individual agreements with PuTTY users. We
+estimate that we have literally \e{millions} of users, and we
+absolutely would not have time to go round signing specific
+agreements with every one of them. So if you want us to sign
+something specific for you, you might usefully stop to consider
+whether there's anything special that distinguishes you from 999,999
+other users, and therefore any reason we should be willing to sign
+something for you without it setting such a precedent.
+
+If your company policy requires you to have an individual agreement
+with the supplier of any software you use, then your company policy
+is simply not well suited to using popular free software, and we
+urge you to consider this as a flaw in your policy.
+
+\S{faq-permission-assurance}{Question} If you won't sign anything,
+can you give us some sort of assurance that you won't make PuTTY
+closed-source in future?
+
+Yes and no.
+
+If what you want is an assurance that some \e{current version} of
+PuTTY which you've already downloaded will remain free, then you
+already have that assurance: it's called the PuTTY Licence. It
+grants you permission to use, distribute and copy the software to
+which it applies; once we've granted that permission (which we
+have), we can't just revoke it.
+
+On the other hand, if you want an assurance that \e{future} versions
+of PuTTY won't be closed-source, that's more difficult. We could in
+principle sign a document stating that we would never release a
+closed-source PuTTY, but that wouldn't assure you that we \e{would}
+keep releasing \e{open}-source PuTTYs: we would still have the
+option of ceasing to develop PuTTY at all, which would surely be
+even worse for you than making it closed-source! (And we almost
+certainly wouldn't \e{want} to sign a document guaranteeing that we
+would actually continue to do development work on PuTTY; we
+certainly wouldn't sign it for free. Documents like that are called
+contracts of employment, and are generally not signed except in
+return for a sizeable salary.)
+
+If we \e{were} to stop developing PuTTY, or to decide to make all
+future releases closed-source, then you would still be free to copy
+the last open release in accordance with the current licence, and in
+particular you could start your own fork of the project from that
+release. If this happened, I confidently predict that \e{somebody}
+would do that, and that some kind of a free PuTTY would continue to
+be developed. There's already precedent for that sort of thing
+happening in free software. We can't guarantee that somebody
+\e{other than you} would do it, of course; you might have to do it
+yourself. But we can assure you that there would be nothing
+\e{preventing} anyone from continuing free development if we
+stopped.
+
+(Finally, we can also confidently predict that if we made PuTTY
+closed-source and someone made an open-source fork, most people
+would switch to the latter. Therefore, it would be pretty stupid of
+us to try it.)
+
+\S{faq-export-cert}{Question} Can you provide us with export control
+information / FIPS certification for PuTTY?
+
+Some people have asked us for an Export Control Classification Number
+(ECCN) for PuTTY. We don't know whether we have one, and as a team of
+free software developers based in the UK we don't have the time,
+money, or effort to deal with US bureaucracy to investigate any
+further. We believe that PuTTY falls under 5D002 on the US Commerce
+Control List, but that shouldn't be taken as definitive. If you need
+to know more you should seek professional legal advice. The same
+applies to any other country's legal requirements and restrictions.
+
+Similarly, some people have asked us for FIPS certification of the
+PuTTY tools. Unless someone else is prepared to do the necessary work
+and pay any costs, we can't provide this.
\H{faq-misc} Miscellaneous questions
projects / u / mdw / putty / blobdiff