FreeSSHd Installation
The first thing to do is to install FreeSSHd. It is a free tool that can be downloaded from Download FreeSSHd.
After the download completes, we will proceed to execute the installer. On the first screen we’ll see:
Select the installation folder and click Next.
Select Full installation and click Next.
Click Next on this screen:
Let the installer create a desktop icon for us.
We need private keys to be created, so we select ‘Yes’.
We also want the FreeSSHd to run as a service, so we select ‘Yes’ once more:
To finish the installation, we click on Finish and proceed to configure the application:
FreeSSHd Configuration
Open the program by clicking over the desktop icon:
Over the FreeSSHd tray icon that appears afterwards, right click it and select ‘Settings’:
Go to the SSH tab and select a number for the listening port. The default value is 22, so it may already be in use, change it to something you’ll remember easily:
You could limit the number of simultaneous connections, 0 means unlimited. Also you could change the RSA and DSA keys for ones of 2048 bits (which are more secure) in exchange of some proportional performance downgrade.
Select the Authentication tab and require password authentication:
Go to the Encryption tab and select AES256:
Go to the Tunneling tab and enable port forwarding:
Go to the Logging tab and enable it for troubleshooting:
Now go to the “Users” tab and click over the button ‘Add...’ to create a new user for the SSH connection.
Select to store the password as SHA1 hash:
Now that everything is configured click over the ‘Apply’ button:
If you see a message like this click ‘Yes’:
Return to the Server Status tab and click the hyperlink to start the SSH server:
If you see this message, please allow access to your networks:
If you can see this screen afterwards means you have configured your server correctly. Congratulations!
If you see a bubble notification similar to this:
Or an error message like ‘Generic error for access violation’, means the port you typed in the SSH tab may already be in use. Choose another number and repeat the last step.
Wrapping up what we have seen here, we first installed FreeSSHd on our server, then configure the SSH listening port, select the encryption type, require authentication and create a user and password for that. In this posts we have learn how to set up a SSH server running on Windows, allowing us to connect in a securer way to it.