Putty: Simple trick to log all session output by default

I am using putty for telnet and SSH connections to ESXi hosts, switches and/or filers. Putty is a simple but great tool for this purpose!

Putty has the option to log telnet and SSH traffic session output to disk. I think it’s a good idea to always log the telnet and SSH session output of every session to a file. In this way you always have a great reference/history available, which contains all previous commands and output of earlier telnet and SSH sessions.

Configure Putty

When you want putty to log all your session output, you have to change the default settings. This is pretty simple: open putty and go to Session->Logging. Select all session output and specify a log file.

I am using some putty parameters which will make every session unique, in this case “&H-&Y&M&D-&T.log”, which means:

• &H = hostname for the session
• &Y = year
• &M = month
• &D = day
• &T = time

The next step is save this new log settings to the Default Settings profile in putty; the Default Settings profile contains your….uh…Default Settings . Every new putty session
will now log its output to a (new) logfile. Already saved sessions will not be affected by this setting, you have to change these sessions separately.

You will now end up with a bunch of unique log files for the various putty sessions and you’re building your own great putty-reference-database in the log directory specified.