putty

This is a description of how to set up a secure tunnel between your MySQL Server and a locally running MySQL Administrator using Putty. By creating a secure tunnel to your MySQL server using Putty, you can grant localhost access to powerful applications like MySQL Administrator while at the same time, make your server appear as if it isn't even there. In effect, make your MySQL server disappear from the outside world.

This guide describes how to generate and use a private/public key pair to log in to a remote system with SSH using PuTTY. PuTTY is an SSH client that is available for Windows and Linux (although it is more common on Windows systems). Using key-based SSH logins, you can disable the normal username/password login procedure which means that only people with a valid private/public key pair can log in. That way, there is no way for brute-force attacks to be successful, so your system is more secure.