Portable PuTTY
I recently acquired a new 2Gb USB key (an upgrade from my 256Mb one) and have been trying to convert a lot of my applications so they’re more portable.
My first goal was to convert PuTTY into a portable app so I can have my same list regardless of where I am. Turns out there are instructions for this in the PuTTY documentation.
First, you’ll want to pull your existing list of PuTTY sites:
regedit /ea putty.reg HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\SimonTatham\PuTTY
Next, you’ll want to create a batch file that will launch a couple of .reg files:
@ECHO OFF
regedit /s putty.reg
regedit /s puttyrnd.reg
start /w putty.exe
regedit /ea new.reg HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\SimonTatham\PuTTY
copy new.reg putty.reg
del new.reg
regedit /s puttydel.reg
Finally, the reg files:
puttyrnd.reg
REGEDIT4
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\SimonTatham\PuTTY]
"RandSeedFile"="c:\\putty.rnd"
puttydel.reg
REGEDIT4
[-HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\SimonTatham\PuTTY]
The putty.reg file is the one you’ll create from your current list of sites.
You’ll want to make sure that you have access to write to the location where you’re going to store your PuTTY random seed file in the puttyrnd.reg file. I chose C: but if you plan on using this at a public computer, you probably won’t have access to the C: drive so you’ll need to chose another location.
You can find the entry in for this in the PuTTY documentation at http://the.earth.li/~sgtatham/putty/0.58/puttydoc.txt
in the section 4.24 Storing configuration in a file.