Spring Server SSH Guide

To connect to your Spring Server℠ VPS, you will need to use the SSH protocol. SSH allows you to establish a secure, encrypted connection to a remote server. OSX and Linux usually have a native SSH client, but for Windows you will need to install one separately. There are many clients available, but we personally recommend PuTTY. You can download a copy of this free program here.

Since PuTTY requires no installation, you may simply run the program from wherever you have downloaded it. When you run PuTTY, you will be show the connection options and it will look something like this:

Figure 1

Under the Session option, the "Hostname (or IP address)" field should be the hostname or IP of your Spring Server VPS. You can view your Spring Server VPS information by clicking on your service here. Filling out that field and clicking Open should be all that is needed to connect to the server; however, to make it easier in the future, the following steps will show you how to save it for future use.

With the Hostname field filled in, go to the Data section under the Connection Category. As shown in the following screenshot, you will see a field labeled Auto-Login Username.

Figure 2

There you will put in the username of your account on the spring server. By default, the only user for your server is "root" (without quotes), so type that in.

Almost done! Go back to the Sessions category in PuTTY and this time type in a name in the saved Sessions field. You can see I used "My Spring Server" here:

Figure 3

Click Save and it will be saved into the list.

Figure 4

Now you just need to select My Spring Server and click Open and you will connect to your server. When you do that, you will see a message similar to the following:

The authenticity of host 'yourspringserver.com (1.2.3.4)' can't be established.
RSA key fingerprint is 12:34:5e:fb:eb:1d:a9:41:6e:d2:2d:e3:58:d6:8d:b9.
Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)?

No need to panic, it is a standard warning. It means the the server you are visiting, yourspringserver.com, is one that you haven't connected to before. If the hostname and IP are correct, you know it's the right server and you didn't enter the wrong hostname. The RSA key fingerprint is the data PuTTY wil store if you let it so that it knows it's been here before. If the server changes, and it isn't the same fingerprint, PuTTY will ask this again to make sure it's the correct server; otherwise, you won't see this message again.

If you type "yes" (without the quotes) and hit enter, you will be asked for your login information:

Using username "root".
root@yourspringserver.com's password:

Since you saved the username as root, it knows that and you just need to type in your password. How do you know your password? When your server was activated, you were sent an email similar to the following:

Dear DynDNS.com User,
The activation of your DynDNS(r) Spring Server(sm) VPS instance is now
complete. You can use the following credentials to log into your new Spring
Server instance via SSH:
Server Name:
yourspringserver.com
IPv4 Address: 1.2.3.4
IPv6 Address: 2002:0:0:0:0:0:102:304
Username:
root
Password:
abcdefghijk
If you have questions, please contact support@dyndns.com.

You can see your password listed there in the email. Once you use that, you will be logged into your Spring Server VPS and can begin setting up your server!