In the past week I have had my good share of working on remote systems where I needed to utilize the tool PuTTY to issue commands; not all of them documented. To assist me in documenting my steps I often use the session logs. However this normal has been a manual process in the heat of the moment and sometimes enabling logging is an afterthought.
To guarantee that this is done I have preformed the following steps to the default configuration of my PuTTY client and all saved sessions so that logs are saved and dated for future reference. I wish to record those here for any of you who would like to do the same.
[Press Start]
Open PuTTy
Under Category, choose Logging
Under Session Logging, choose the option “All session output”
Under file name: choose a directory and log filename
Using the PuTTY log parameters I configure my logs to consists of host, year, month, data and time for each session.
I also selected the option to “Always append to the end” of the session log which is currently open”
Finally, saving this new log settings to the Default Settings profile in putty making this the default logging option for all future connections and saved profiles.
Note: Profiles that existed before this change will need to be modified if you wish to also log the session output.
Log Parameters:
- &H = hostname for the session
- &Y = year
- &M = month
- &D = day
- &T = time
Example Log’s:
Short Video on how to do this
[youtube id=”2LZfWH8HffA” width=”600″ height=”350″]