The number of people has been steadily increasing who read our source
code with an editor that thinks tab stops are 4 spaces apart, as
opposed to the traditional tty-derived 8 that the PuTTY code expects.
So I've been wondering for ages about just fixing it, and switching to
a spaces-only policy throughout the code. And I recently found out
about 'git blame -w', which should make this change not too disruptive
for the purposes of source-control archaeology; so perhaps now is the
time.
While I'm at it, I've also taken the opportunity to remove all the
trailing spaces from source lines (on the basis that git dislikes
them, and is the only thing that seems to have a strong opinion one
way or the other).
Apologies to anyone downstream of this code who has complicated patch
sets to rebase past this change. I don't intend it to be needed again.
- Mention public key authentication
- Define and describe the "terminal window"
- Mention trust sigils
- Describe here the lack of feedback in password prompts, as well as in
the FAQ
While it's still true, the link to Winsock 2 is dead, our standard
release builds don't run on Win95 any more, and it's certainly not
frequently asked.
- I haven't heard of OpenSSH/OpenSSL mismatches being a common problem
for a long time. Specific advice about OpenSSH 3.1/3.4 seems unlikely
to be useful these days.
- "Incorrect MAC received on packet" doesn't seem to be a common
problem these days, and if anyone encounters it, the words in the
"Errors" bit of the docs seem adequate without a FAQ entry as well.
Conflicts in the FAQ are fixed by incorporating Jacob's rewritten
post-0.68 version. (But owing to considerable git confusion I haven't
managed to get his name on to this commit anywhere.)
Several places in the docs were labelled for review because they need
to change when 0.68's feature set comes in - no SSH-2 to SSH-1
fallback any more, but on the other hand, Unix Pageant now exists.
(In a XXX-REVIEW-BEFORE-RELEASE form.)
Also, note the effect of compilation with different Visual Studio
versions on Windows version compatibility in the source README, for the
sake of having it written down somewhere.
They were there mainly to distinguish from 16-bit Windows, which hasn't
been a thing since before a noticeable fraction of the userbase were
born, probably. These days the obvious comparison is with 64-bit
Windows.
Also tweak some wording to reflect that official PuTTY executables are
not necessarily 32-bit any more, and add some XXX-REVIEW-BEFORE-RELEASE
in the same vein.
The UI now only has "1" and "2" options for SSH protocol version, which
behave like the old "1 only" and "2 only" options; old
SSH-N-with-fallback settings are interpreted as SSH-N-only.
This prevents any attempt at a protocol downgrade attack.
Most users should see no difference; those poor souls who still have to
work with SSH-1 equipment now have to explicitly opt in.
I think the deterministic DSA system we've been using for ages can now
be considered proven in use, not to mention the fact that RFC 6979 and
the Ed25519 spec both give variants on the same idea. So I've removed
the 'don't use DSA if you can avoid it' warning.
The aim is to try to reduce the incidence of the two least helpful
classes of those reports: the ones which have just got mismatched
checksum files, and the ones which don't tell us the information that
would help.
I've shifted away from using the SVN revision number as a monotonic
version identifier (replacing it in the Windows version resource with
a count of days since an arbitrary epoch), and I've removed all uses
of SVN keyword expansion (replacing them with version information
written out by Buildscr).
While I'm at it, I've done a major rewrite of the affected code which
centralises all the computation of the assorted version numbers and
strings into Buildscr, so that they're all more or less alongside each
other rather than scattered across multiple source files.
I've also retired the MD5-based manifest file system. A long time ago,
it seemed like a good idea to arrange that binaries of PuTTY would
automatically cease to identify themselves as a particular upstream
version number if any changes were made to the source code, so that if
someone made a local tweak and distributed the result then I wouldn't
get blamed for the results. Since then I've decided the whole idea is
more trouble than it's worth, so now distribution tarballs will have
version information baked in and people can just cope with that.
[originally from svn r10262]
This option is available from the command line as '-hostkey', and is
also configurable through the GUI. When enabled, it completely
replaces all of the automated host key management: the server's host
key will be checked against the manually configured list, and the
connection will be allowed or disconnected on that basis, and the host
key store in the registry will not be either consulted or updated.
The main aim is to provide a means of automatically running Plink,
PSCP or PSFTP deep inside Windows services where HKEY_CURRENT_USER
isn't available to have stored the right host key in. But it also
permits you to specify a list of multiple host keys, which means a
second use case for the same mechanism will probably be round-robin
DNS names that select one of several servers with different host keys.
Host keys can be specified as the standard MD5 fingerprint or as an
SSH-2 base64 blob, and are canonicalised on input. (The base64 blob is
more unwieldy, especially with Windows command-line length limits, but
provides a means of specifying the _whole_ public key in case you
don't trust MD5. I haven't bothered to provide an analogous mechanism
for SSH-1, on the basis that anyone worrying about MD5 should have
stopped using SSH-1 already!)
[originally from svn r10220]
questionnaires in unfriendly formats like Excel, apparently in the
mistaken belief that we have some kind of incentive to answer them. I
hope I've managed to identify the key reason why they make this
mistake.
[originally from svn r10156]
page. Define in more detail what we mean by "Windows" in the Ports section of
the FAQ.
[originally from svn r8733]
[this svn revision also touched putty-website]
Attempts at damage limitation from the name similarity with pterm.
Also try to refresh the ports section of the FAQ a bit.
[originally from svn r8139]
[this svn revision also touched putty-website]
know how I'd go about retrieving money from them any more because my
last exchange transaction went through a company who subsequently
turned out to be dodgy; and a user points out that e-gold is in
legal trouble, which suggests that avoiding it is probably wise.
[originally from svn r7604]
