Last modified: 2013-09-11 22:45:58 UTC
PuTTY is available as a single, standalone .exe file, 472 KB in size. Jakub Kotrla's set of patches (available at http://jakub.kotrla.net/putty/) make PuTTY read session configurations from disk rather than the Windows Registry. Because of this, and because the purpose of the machine is to provide a lightweight, disposable development environment, the VM itself can be configured quite insecurely. Vagrant installations use a common, generic private/public key pair for SSH access. (Remember that the Vagrant VM is networked via a private, virtual ethernet interface that links it exclusively to the host, which is why this is OK.) Because that's the case, the integrity of PuTTY isn't much of a concern. We just have to make it clear that the bundled PuTTY is insecure by design and inappropriate for any uses other than Vagrant. If we were really worried about this we could build our own crippled executable.
Kotrla's build is 32-bit only. http://kitty.9bis.net/ is both 32-bit and 64-bit, but it has a bunch of unnecessary features, and lacks license information, so I'm leery of using it. I think recommending git-bash (part of Git for Windows) is probably best. It comes with an SSH client.
[mass-moving from Tools>MediaWiki-Vagrant to separate product. See bug 54041. Filter bugmail on this comment.]
