When you access servers at a customer site or in a hosting center you often have to use a Remote Desktop (RDP). These jump servers are often locked down so you cannot install programs or access the Registry via Regedit. This is frustrating if you use Putty and have a lot of servers. I currently have situation where I have to access 60+ servers in a hosting center via RDP. The RDP server is a two node cluster so I have to configure 60 Putty sessions on two nodes 🙁

It is a bit cumbersome and if you decide that you want to change the font color or maybe the size of the Console Window it take some doing 🙂

I have tried to use a portable version of Putty but I did not like it much. Luckily my colleague Søren Møller quickly provided a solution. .Net is installed on most Windows servers so he wrote a short program that can read and write Registry keys.

ReadWriteRegistry.exe:
This tool is mainly thought of as a helper to export/impoet PyTTY registry settings. Therefore it only manages a sub-set of registry datatypes. Multistring and Binary are not supported.

Usages: ReadWriteRegistry import|export [file] [key]

Default fileName is c:\RegistryExport.dat
Default key is HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\SimonTatham\PuTTY

Fx:
ReadWriteRegistry import c:\MyData.dat
ReadWriteRegistry export c:\MyData.dat HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\SimonTatham\PuTTY