Puttygen known_hosts

I've been able to configure git/Windows 7 to use PuTTY's plink to authenticate with Stash. However, the weak link of this method is that PuTTY does not provide the "do you trust this host? (yes/no)" prompt so I have to add Stash as a trusted host using gits ssh prior to configuring PuTTY and then importing the known_hosts using the Python kh2reg.py script. Is there a way to add stash to PuTTY's known_hosts file without doing this python hack?

BTW, for me, msysGit ssh resulted in 1 MiB/s throuput while PuTTY ssh resulted in 5 MiB/s throughput. I still don't understand why this is so slow, but it's a 5x improvement.

Install PuTTY

Install putty to a directory that does not contain spaces in the path. Example: c:\tools\PuTTY. If the path to putty includes spaces, the GIT_SSH environment variable cannot be used to point to plink correctly.

Set GIT_SSH

Set a system variable that sets GIT_SSH to the location of plink.exe in the putty installation. Example: GIT_SSH=c:\tools\PuTTY\plink.exe

Import keys into PuTTY

Run the PuTTY GUI puttygen to import the ssh private key. Save the PuTTY key as ~/.ssh/id_rsa.ppk.

Start pageant

This needs to be started each time you reboot.

C:\tools\putty\pagent.exe C:\Users\USERID\.ssh\id_rsa.ppk

Install Python Import known_hosts

PuTTY stores it's known_hosts into the Windows registry. I've not figured out how to cause PuTTY to accept Stash as a known host due to not being able to login to Stash using PuTTY. To get around this, the known_hosts file is imported using kh2reg.py