Administer Ubuntu Server 12.04 remotely using Putty

NOTE: If you're jumping into this guide here and have not been following from the start then in order to be able to use Putty to administer Ubuntu Server you will need to have installed "OpenSSH Server" when you installed Ubuntu. For information, these instructions has been verified using the following versions of Ubuntu Server: 12.04LTS Precise Pangolin, 10.10 Maverick Meerkat, 10.04 Lucid Lynx, 9.10 Karmic Koala, 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope & 8.10 Intrepid Ibex.

Normally, when we already installed Ubuntu, we cannot remote it from putty yet. we have to install OpenSSH to Ubuntu first.

If you've not installed OpenSSH Server already then you can do so by issuing the following two commands from the command line on your server:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install openssh-server

To administer the server remotely is not as hard as you might think. Putty is a very popular way of doing so although everything is done at "command line" which does scare quite a few people. However, later on we'll install VNC to provide a graphical interface which will make things a whole lot simpler, especially for the Windows veterans amongst us.

So, back onto your Windows desktop computer now and download Putty.exe from here and install it on your desktop computer. When you launch it the main screen looks something like this: