Can't see more than the first few lines in an SSH connection

Question

I need some help for SSH buffer size.

I have a vista machine at home and i have installed "Free SSHD" on it. I also have Dynamic DNS setup to access some of my home lab equipment which are connected to this vista machine. From my work machine which is an XP machine I connect to my home machine using Putty. Everything up to this point is working fine without any problem.

The issue is I can't see more lines than the first few lines of the output.

I press the space bar to get more output off the screen and the output scrolls up and it gets lost as the more output gets displayed on the screen. The Putty client i am using on my work machine has been setup with enough buffer size but the output still only displays few lines and as it moves up, the buffer gets empty automatically. I have searched the entire web and haven’t found any proper solution any where.

Can someone please help here? Thanks.

Answer 1

FreeSSHd, like many other command-line remote access systems for Windows, handles all terminal drawing server-side. Scrolling text is displayed to the client by using escape sequences to redraw the entire screen, thus nothing is entered into PuTTY's scrollback.

An alternative might be to use Cygwin with OpenSSH, but that does require a lot of extra effort. Beyond that, well, pipe command to "more" to page the output.