PuTTY version 0.54 is released

[Simon Tatham]

PuTTY version 0.54 is released
------------------------------

All the pre-built binaries, and the source code, are now available
from the PuTTY website at

    http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/

Development work on PuTTY for the past year or so has mostly
involved taking it apart and putting it back together again for
improved portability; so I'm afraid there aren't many visible new
features in 0.54. Some of the highlights are:

 - Dynamic SSH port forwarding. PuTTY can now act as a SOCKS server,
   and programs using that server will have their connections
   forwarded over SSH.

 - PSFTP should now be usefully fast.

 - When connecting through a proxy (SOCKS or HTTP), PuTTY is now
   able to let the proxy do the DNS lookup.

 - Some of the default settings have changed. Notably, the SSH
   protocol is now the default, and SSH2 is preferred over SSH1.
   (This will not affect anyone who already has Default Settings
   stored in their registry, since those override PuTTY's internal
   defaults.)

 - Bug fix: forwarding SMB connections over SSH should now work.

 - Bug fix: the configuration box was slow to respond because it
   occasionally went looking for printers across the network by
   accident. It shouldn't do this any more.

 - A couple of minor vulnerabilities have been fixed (none with very
   serious impact, or with known exploits).

But the _really_ big feature resulting from the substantial rewrite
is that there is now a Unix version of most of the PuTTY utilities:

 - There's a Unix PuTTY and PuTTYtel, which are GTK applications.

 - There's a Unix Plink, PSCP and PSFTP, which look pretty much
   exactly like their Windows equivalents.

 - There's a Unix PuTTYgen, which is a command-line program unlike
   its Windows counterpart. Anyone who needs to convert OpenSSH or
   ssh.com private keys into PuTTY format in an automated way may be
   able to do it using this utility.

 - There's an entirely new utility: `pterm', which is an xterm clone
   using the PuTTY terminal emulator. (Again, it uses GTK.)

 - As yet there is no Unix version of Pageant, but all the utilities
   can interoperate with OpenSSH's ssh-agent.

The Unix port is available from the PuTTY Download page as a source
tarball.

Enjoy using PuTTY!

Cheers,
Simon
-- 
Simon Tatham         "Happiness is having a large, warm, loving,
<anakin@pobox.com>    caring, close-knit family in another city."