MobaXterm – A tool what is cool (for devops / sys-admins)

In short:

As a devops, I need a lot of tool during my work. SSH-client (with port forwarding), (S)FTP client, cygwin, RDP client, network / port scanner, xdmcp-client, serial-client and a lot more… I have dedicated app for all of these tasks, but separated. And this is the main-goal of MobaXterm: Everything integrated into one main application connected together!

If you work too on heterogen environment this tool what you need / want.

Details:

Now I share a few most used features by me which makes my life easier.

Multi-tab:

Who like to work effectively will search for a multi-tab solution instead of use PuTTY. PuTTY is a great windows SSH-client, know SSH-tunneling and other things, but not the most user-friendly solution from UI-side as you must to handle all of opened session as a separated window. In MobaXterm you get multi-tab feature by default. You can use multi-tab, with great features like “MultiExec” –> You write your command to one terminal-window and MobaXterm will broadcast / mux {multiplex} to all opened terminal window (you can exclude terminals if you want). Very-very useful feature if you must to do the same on more than >2 machine. less time, more rest 🙂

 

 

Use your windows like a linux:

This can be done thanks to integrated cygwin.  With it you can handle your terminal in your host-machine (windows) as a bash. cygwin works as expected under the hood. “pwd” or “ls -ltrha” can be used & with package manager you can install a tons of binaries, like “curl”.

Visualize messages on logs:

This is the most useful feature what I ever used. As an admin in case of problem / outage I always check the logs. For this scenarion would be fine if typical strings will be highlighted (Error; connected; warning;…) and MobaXterm do it Out-Of-Box. No any additional manual work, script-write, or anything else. You use and is just work 🙂

 

Copy files from/to remote:

Before MobaXterm I always used WinSCP for this purpose. No any dissatisfaction from my side, just I need an another tool again, an another necessary configuration again, and one more, unnecessary opened window again 🙂 With MobaXterm, it was solved, Drag’n Drop supported, moreover you can edit files with built-in editor. Great feature in cases if you would like to visualize syntax of file.

 

Tunneling:

Tunneling is an important thing for an admin as I think. It can be done with other apps like PuTTY too but not as easy as with MobaXterm. You get a simply graphical explanation menatime you set your tunnel. You get a summary window too with a lot of possible settings like proxy, autostart, auto-reconnect…

 

Conclusion:

This tool, what I ever wanted 🙂 Just to be sure: This post is not a supported post by Mobatek. All listed feature are detailed with my experience.

Applications which can be replaced with this one tool:

  • PuTTY
  • SuperPuTTY
  • WinSCP
  • Xming
  • Windwos Remote Desktop Connection
  • Notepad++ (maybe – built in editor very useful)
  • Cygwin

Home edition have few limitation but I guess if you start to use this tool you will want the professional-version like me (if you would like to work efficiency with one tool instead of 4-5.):)

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