Connecting for the first time

If you are new to WinSSHD, we highly recommend that you first make sure that you can establish a working SSH connection before you change any settings on the server. If you cannot connect to WinSSHD using its default configuration, this is most likely due to a network or firewall problem that you will need to resolve before you are able to connect.

In its default configuration, WinSSHD accepts connections on the well-known port number for SSH servers, 22. This is the only port you need to open in your firewall in order to connect to WinSSHD. If you use port forwarding to tunnel other applications through SSH, you should not open any additional ports for the tunneled connections. All tunnelled connections are forwarded through the SSH session, established through port 22.

When connecting to WinSSHD with an SSH client for the first time, log in with the username and password of a Windows account that exists on the server where WinSSHD is running. To log into a Windows domain account, specify it in the 'domain\account' format.

You can use any SSH client to log into WinSSHD, as long as it supports SSH protocol version 2. Some Unix installations still have old SSH implementations which only support SSH version 1. Such installations must be upgraded, as SSH1 contains security flaws. In general, security software, in particular such as an SSH server, should always be kept up-to-date to minimize exposure to security flaws.

Clients that are known to work well with WinSSHD include Tunnelier (which works best), as well as CuteFTP Pro, ssh.com's clients, F-Secure / WRQ / Reflection, VanDyke (SecureCRT, SecureFX), OpenSSH, PuTTY, FileZilla, and many others. WinSCP works well in SFTP mode.