Microsoft To Support SSH In Windows and Contribute To OpenSSH

An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft has announced plans for native support for SSH in Windows. "A popular request the PowerShell team has received is to use Secure Shell protocol and Shell session (aka SSH) to interoperate between Windows and Linux – both Linux connecting to and managing Windows via SSH and, vice versa, Windows connecting to and managing Linux via SSH. Thus, the combination of PowerShell and SSH will deliver a robust and secure solution to automate and to remotely manage Linux and Windows systems." Based on the work from this new direction, they also plan to contribute back to the OpenSSH project as well.

Comments

Odd thoughts:

[Penguinisto]

* I remember joking about connecting to a 'doze server via SSH in 2005. Usually the response was a disgusted shiver.

* I guess Microsoft finally got sick of seeing PuTTY's hegemony in the terminal/SSH client market, and decided that this, *this* was a market they could finally dominate in this day and age?

* I shudder to think of how bastardized the command options are going to be, given the PowerShell's habit of using stuff like '-omgLookAtThisMassiveOptionNamingConvention', to the point where they have to alias a frickin' option...

Ah well, good on 'em. I'll stick with using Linux and OSX clients, thanks much.

Re:Odd thoughts:

[kosmosik]

> I guess Microsoft finally got sick of seeing PuTTY's hegemony in
> the terminal/SSH client market

You guess wrong. There is basically no market for terminal/ssh clients. And if it is it is peanuts. There is HUGE market for centralized management tools like OpenStack, Chief, Puppet, etc. - and that is at what Microsoft is aiming. Basically they need SSH compatibility to manage Linux boxes and they want and they do (Azure) manage Linux boxes.

> I shudder to think of how bastardized the command options are going
> to be, given the PowerShell's habit of using stuff like
> '-omgLookAtThisMassiveOptionNamingConvention', to the point where
> they have to alias a frickin' option...

Oh like in GNU/Linux/BSD utils are just kosher and standardized... please... each tiny utility comes from few other schools of command line switches and are usually different. Threre is no standardisation of switches in commands used on Linux. Usually if you need to do something comples (that you haven't yet memorized) you need to open other terminal window with manual to do it. Of course this is a different *convention* from PowerShell but PS is not that bad - it is just different.

> Ah well, good on 'em. I'll stick with using Linux and OSX clients, thanks much.

Oh OSX clients and bastardized commands. Come on... ;)

And for the record I really like Linux and use it all the time. I also happen to use Windows and OSX as clients and they are also fine. Any effort to bring more interoperability between those systems is welcome in my opinion.

Re:Odd thoughts:

[nmb3000]

Well, when you're typing out Unix commands on an teletype that's 80 characters wide, creating short options first made a lot of sense.

Powershell's approach is more verbose, but it's also a little more readable (same as long options in Linux), especially when you're dealing with things more complicated than "copy a file", such as "create AD forest trust" or "reconfigure Exchange retention policies". That said, I still tend to use short options by default.

One thing nice about Powershell is that you can truncate options as long as they're not abmiguous. So you can make -Recursive be -Rec, or even -R, as long as there's not also a -Recreate or -Recover options. That seems to be a nice middle-ground.

Come now

[s.petry]

You know it's going to be just yet another way of hacking into a Windows box.

Re:Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes

[mi]

What exactly are you scared about?

That, for example, in order to ssh into a remote Windows system you'll have to use Microsoft's ssh-client — because they'll use some funky cipher/digest combination or some other "extension". They did it to Kerberos before...

Or that interactive logins will only work on certain terminal emulators — because nothing else will be able to properly emulate powershell's window — just imagine the termcaps entry...

In the link I gave there is a large list of Microsoft's earlier attempts to kill a standard by first adopting it — read it up...