Today in Vista-compatible applications: Vandyke's SecureCRT 5.5

Following the latest trend, Vandyke Software started updating their applications to comply with the Windows Vista guidelines. First is SecureCRT, the renowned SSH/Telnet client, with the 5.5 Beta 1 version released on the 8th of February.

A nice addition is the New Session Wizard, which makes creating new connections a snap. Of course, it exposes only the basic options, so you might still want to open the advanced properties dialog if you need to make advanced changes (eg: specify the terminal emulation setting).

There is now a script recorder included with the program, which records all keystrokes in the current sessions and outputs VB scripts.

A nice touch is the autosessions option, which allows for multiple sessions or entire folders to be launched at SecureCRT's startup.

The logging system got an interesting addition as well: users can define custom data bits to be added to logs. Optionally, logs will include only these custom bits.

Among the SSH protocol related changes and fixes, one stands out most: zlib@openssh is now supported, which prevents the zlib library from caching unencrypted passwords by enabling compression compression only after the authentication sequence.

Continue below for download links and detailed changelog...


*** DOWNLOAD LINKS FOR SECURECRT 5.5 BETA 1 ***

Get it now: Download SecureCRT 5.5 Beta 1
exe installer, 7MB, MD5 hash: 6AAEA7227A3D9A18058F52A9E14F9D7D

Check out the SecureCRT BETA product page
Visit the VanDyke homepage


*** WHAT'S NEW IN SECURECRT 5.5 BETA 1 ***

New features:
- Windows Vista support.
- Added a script recorder, which generates VB scripts. When "Start Recording Script" is selected from the Script menu, all keystrokes in the current session are recorded until "Stop Recording Script" is selected.
- A set of sessions can be launched automatically on startup by specifying folders or multiple sessions as auto sessions.
- Added the ability to insert custom data to log files. Custom data can be inserted when a session connects, disconnects, or on each line. Substitution parameters for session, date, and time information are supported. Additionally, there is an
option to log only custom data.
- When ANSI color is being used, it is now possible to use a color scheme, which allows the background to be something other than black and the foreground to be something other than white.
- Added script function GetScriptTab, which returns the tab from which the script was started.
- Added new custom menu item MENU_TAB_LIST1, which causes all the tabbed sessions to be displayed in the menu.
- SFTP: Added "ascii" and "binary" command options to the SFTP tab.
- SSH2: Added support for generating OpenSSH format keys and for converting VanDyke format private keys to OpenSSH format.
- SSH2: Added a global option to cache passwords for SSH2 sessions.
- SSH2: Added support for zlib@openssh.com compression. With this compression method, compression does not start until after authentication, which prevents unencrypted passwords from being cached by the zlib library.

Changes:
- By default, Internet Explorer 7 disables Telnet through a registry setting. Added support for overriding this setting so that SecureCRT can be set as the default Telnet application.
Administrator privileges are required in order to override the setting. Versions of Internet Explorer prior to 7 are not affected by this change.
- When multiple sessions are opened from the "Connect" dialog, if the "Open in a tab" setting is off, the sessions are opened in tabs in a new window.
- The chat window can now be toggled when SecureCRT is maximized or full screen.
- When creating a session, if the Terminal, VT100, or VT102 font is selected, the "Use Unicode line-drawing characters" will be unchecked.
- The "Save connected folder state" option was moved from the "Connect" dialog to the "General" page in the "Global Options" dialog.
- Files with .VBE extension are included in the Script Files filter in the "Select Script to Run" dialog.

Bug fixes:
- Under certain circumstances, text was highlighted incorrectly after highlighted text had been pasted into a session.
- Under certain circumstances, when SecureCRT got an error and became unresponsive, the Migration wizard ran.
- It was not possible to cancel out of the "Global Options" dialog if an incorrect status indicator width or minimum tab width was entered.
- When using send string functionality with a mapped key, \p (pause) did not work correctly.
- If the specified log file was a valid path, but did not have a filename and the "Prompt for filename" option was not set, when logging started, an error that the specified file could not be created was reported.
- If a script that connected to a session was run in a tabbed session that had been disconnected, the script hung.
- The script function ConnectInTab used the default session font instead of the specified session's font.
- The /SCRIPT command-line argument was not honored when /T was used and the session was opened in a tab other than the first tab.
- SSH1: The command-line option /I pubkeyfile command-line option did not work with /SSH1.
- SSH2: Under certain circumstances, using a SOCKS proxy caused the Secure Shell transport to hang.