Setting up WinSCP to view DAMTP files remotely

As of 2004-May-13 WinSCP 3.6.1 is current.

To use winscp 3.6.1 (or later) to access your filespace run the installer wizard (hopefully that is simple enough) so we don't have to give examples of how to do it.

Download the installer from the WinSCP home site. (Should we have a local mirror?)

In the following examples we assume that the connection it do one of our public Linux machines pal.damtp.cam.ac.uk, though in practice you should select a suitable machine from the list you can log into.

Hopefully everyone won't pick the same machines or it will run very slowly!

In the session 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.

Then select session on the left and fill in the Host name and the User name fields. Leave password blank, it will prompt for the password when you connect to the server!
The SFTP (allow SCP fallback) tells WinSCP to use the SFTP protocol which avoids the code from 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.

Session setup

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

That setup needs to be done only once per session you want to save (for different sites/servers etc).
To connect to a saves session, select the name you stored it as and hit Login:
pick session

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

browsing

If you have problems with these instructions please contact...

In the session 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.

Then select session on the left and fill in the Host name and the User name fields. Leave password blank, it will prompt for the password when you connect to the server! The SFTP (allow SCP fallback) tells WinSCP to use the SFTP protocol which avoids the code from 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. pal 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 saves 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 saves. 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).