Setting up WinSCP to view Maths files remotely

WinSCP is a Windows program for copying, viewing and editing files securely over the Internet. You can run it on any Windows machine to access files stored on any Unix server (or other machine which supports incoming ssh).

To use winscp to access your filespace, download the installer from the WinSCP home page and run the installer wizard.

WinSCP will run on any version of Windows. Please use ssh.maths.cam.ac.uk or any CMS machine to which you have login access as the Host Name.

In the installation setup select Preferences on the left and select Explorer like if you want the result to look most like the normal file explorer window (or Norton Commander to have that look/feel).

The Explorer like look and feel is probably more like you are already used to so may be easier to start with.

You will be prompted with a login window as soon as you open the program. The settings that you should add are Host name and the User name fields.

The SFTP (allow SCP fallback) tells WinSCP to use the SFTP protocol which avoids the code having to guess various values for the far end and should be much more efficient.

See the Winscp protocols page for more details. In recent versions of WinSCP this is the default setting anyway.

Save the session (it will prompt for a session name), e.g. ssh.maths in this case.

That setup needs to be done only once per session you want to save (for different sites/servers etc).

To connect to a saved session, select the name you stored it as and hit Login:

When you hit the Login button on the session window it will prompt for the remote password:

After a short delay if all is ok you end up with a graphical view of your files.

Almost everything you can do (graphically) with a mapped drive can be done via the WinSCP interface -- including editing documents; it copies the file over, launches the app and arranges to automatically copy the document back when it is saved.

WinSCP can keep local/remote directories synchronised etc, which is more efficient if you want to do significant work on the documents locally (or don't want to stay connected).

If you have problems with these instructions please contact help@maths.