PoTTY version 0.61

heh... "clean potty"

That always cracks me up.

The first time at least. After a few hours, not so much.

So anyway Simon Tatham released version 0.61 of PuTTY a few months ago and I knew that sooner or later I'd have to dig up the PoTTY code, do some cutting and pasting, and pull a new version out of my ass. I really wasn't looking forward to it, since as far as I know nobody uses it. In fact when I moved the PoTTY page from GoDaddy to CheapBastard it was so broken no one could even download the damned thing.

I happened to mention PoTTY on reddit, exposing my ineptitude globally, and after I fixed the page some guy downloaded it... and liked it. And then he immediately found a bug in it. It didn't restore the ObfuscatedKeyword—which I had in error called the "ObfuscatedPassword"—when it loaded a previously saved profile.

I downloaded the PoTTY 0.60 code, checked it out, and quickly found that problem. I mulled over releasing a 0.60a or a 0.60.01 version for a few minutes, but I thought if I was going to go through that kind of hassle (new MD5 sums, rewriting the page, etc) I might as well download the 0.61 code from Simon just to see what I was up against.

I liked the changelog, especially these bullets:

• Bug fix: corruption of port forwarding is fixed (we think).
• Bug fix: various crashes and hangs when exiting on failure,
• Bug fix: Windows clipboard is now read asynchronously, in case of deadlock

I am very familiar with the first and last bullets, so this sealed the deal. That stupid clipboard trick has nailed my ass to the wall numerous times in the past.

Hours later, after cutting and pasting the old code to the new code (that's how I roll), I managed to get a clean compile—linking was the hardest part—and got it to run.

But there is much more to be done before it's released. For one thing, I need to update the OpenSSL libraries.

Most importantly, I need to fix that damned DLL injection problem. The good news is Simon fixed it in PuTTY 0.61, but it's still broken in PoTTY 0.61 (I just now tested both with Luigi's proxocket 0.1.6a DLLs and somehow Simon nailed it). I looked into that last Fall but never found a solution. If you have a clue I could use one.

Then there's little shit, like fixing the ProxyObsession link in the "About" dialog box.

And then it all has to be tested.

So don't hold your breath.

UPDATE 08/20/2011 9:00PM

Bet you didn't know private key authentication was broken, too. PoTTY used to bomb out ungracefully whenever you used a *.ppk file for authentication. Not anymore... but I have no clue how I fixed it. Well, I do have a small clue. It stopped crashing after I included pageant in the build.

This also mysteriously cured the DLL injection issue.

On to OpenSSL...

UPDATE 08/21/2011 7:30AM

The fix to the DLL injection issue was here (click for full size)...


... in winmisc.c, which is not in PuTTY's project files. It is in pageant's project. Another mystery solved.

This function doesn't exist at all in PuTTY 0.60, and dll injection isn't mentioned as being fixed in the 0.61 changelog.

I also upgraded my OpenSSL static libraries to OpenSSL 1.0.0d, which means 1.0.0e should be out any day now. I doubt if that was absolutely necessary, since PoTTY uses a very small chunk of functions in libssl, but I like to stay current.