Unable to create SSH tunnel (Workaround found on 5 year old post in a forum here)

Hi,

I got Windows 10 and I downloaded HeidiSQL yesterday, version 12.12.0.7122 (64 bit) from 2025-10-06 08:56:07. That is a build from 8 days ago. I could not establish an SSH tunnel, not with plink-081.exe, plink.exe, or ssh.exe.

Reading in forums on this site, I found a post from 5 years ago suggesting c:\Program Files\PuTTY\plink.exe and I have version 0.73, and I got that working! Here is the SSH tunnel tab where I specified plink.exe from PuTTY:

The username is the login name to the server. In my case, it is root.

The tab Settings looks like this:

Here are the username and password for the database on the remote server, obviously.

The funny thing is that I am prompted for credentials every time, but I am okay with that for now. I can work like this, and that is what matters to me right now.

I am so happy. I'll go and donate now!

Regards, Jens Malmgren

Glad you fixed it. I cannot tell you why, but yes, older plink versions seem to better integrate with HeidiSQL, not only due to the new interactive prompts.

You may use ssh.exe instead of plink. On Windows 10 that OpenSSH client might be required to get installed first, from the Windows software options.

Another thing is, you may for security reasons use a public/private key for password-less authentication. This is more secure than sending the password over the line each time. And in your case it seems the password is not accepted anyway (probably due to non-Latin1 characters). Just a thought.

Oh, forgot to mention: if you give ssh.exe a chance, note this does not support user/password in the command line, so the mentioned key method is the only way which should work.