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Your first connection

SSH

  1. Open the connection list and add a connection.
  2. Give it a host, a port (22 unless you know otherwise) and a username.
  3. Choose how you authenticate: a password, or a private key. Either way the secret goes into the OS vault — DPAPI on Windows, Keychain on macOS, libsecret on Linux — not into a config file.
  4. Connect. The session opens in a tab.

Connections live in folders, so group them however your estate is organised — by site, by customer, by rack. Select several at once and connect to all of them together.

Serial

Add a connection of type serial and pick the port. On Windows that is a COM number; on Linux usually /dev/ttyUSB0 or /dev/ttyS0; on macOS something like /dev/tty.usbserial-A1041U9K.

Then the settings that matter:

  • Baud rate — 9600 for most console ports, 115200 for plenty of newer kit.
  • Data bits, parity, stop bits — 8, none, 1 is the usual combination.
  • Flow control — none, unless the device documentation says otherwise.

If the output is garbage, the baud rate is wrong. If there is no output at all, press Enter — plenty of devices say nothing until you do.

Permissions on Linux

Serial ports are owned by a group. Add yourself to it, then log out and back in: 

sudo usermod -aG dialout $USER   # Debian, Ubuntu
sudo usermod -aG uucp $USER      # Fedora, Arch

Startup scripts

Anything you type at the start of every session belongs in the connection's startup script — terminal length 0, enable, setting a working directory. It runs as soon as the session opens.

Logging

Turn on session logging per connection and everything is written to a file, either raw or with ANSI escape codes stripped. The stripped version is the one that pastes cleanly into a change record.

Next: building a button.