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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.
You mean I don't need to install Cygwin anymore like I have been doing for the past 15 years to accomplish just that?
Next proposal: implement rsync natively...
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
In which case they will have to release the code that corresponds to binaries - would be useful for checking that there is not some little tweaks to help the NSA -- but if they have already put those into the system DLLs (eg for encryption) we would not really know. Maybe I am too cynical but I am very suspicious of what they did to skype.
The new Microsoft CEO is much more comfortable with FOSS software. We're also seeing initiatives to support Docker containers on Windows and apt/yum/ports style software repositories and I don't think we'd have gotten any of that if Ballmer were still in charge.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
Granted, Powershell 1.0 was pretty horrible, I don't get all the Powershell hate. Have you even tried to learn to use recent versions of it?
I absolutely despised it back when I was deploying Exchange 2007 RTM on Windows Server 2003, but that's going back almost a decade.
These days I use Powershell for a ton of stuff. I love the fact that everything is an object. For example, manager asks me for stats from AD, powershell script requesting user objects and filtering the appropriate fields, BAM, create a CSV, pretty it up in Excel and send it off to my manager.
Plus tying into .NET is kick ass too. I've got scripts that update and extract data from MSSQL, amongst other things. Hell, I even played with scripting text to speech alerting just to see if I could, and it was really easy!
Give it another try, it's actually a lot better
And no, before I'm labelled an MS evangelist: I've worked for 2 ISP's in 100% Linux and BSD environments and have thoroughly used at least 7 or 8 different distro's, I run Linux at home for NAS and Asterisk PBX and I own and operate 2 Macs - in addition to my Windows Desktop PC. My current role just happens to be maintaining a 90% Microsoft Environment
My biggest gripe with some Powershell commands is that their defaults are not as time-tested as the near-equivalent *nix commands. Probably the best example is "get-winevent -log System" showing all of the events in the System log (which on a given system, might be as large as 4 GB in size).
Sure, that's functionally the equivalent of performing "sudo cat /var/log/messages", but of course one could run "sudo less /var/log/messages" and obtain the powerful features of less, such as forward and backward navigation, and not loading the entire file into memory (this is a key weakness of "get-winevent" in general; if its output is piped, it is forced to load everything, therefore forcing the user to use the "-MaxEvents (int64)" switch to limit to the newest X events... and this is also setting aside the fact that Windows sorts by newest events first by default, though this can be changed with the "-Oldest" switch).
The Windows event system in general is strange when looking back at it. You have the post-Vista API (accessible with "get-winevent" or the Event Viewer), and the pre-Vista API (accessible with "get-eventlog"). There are some event sources whose events aren't rendered properly (i.e.: the description of the event will read something like "The description for Event ID X in Source Y could not be found. It contains the following insertion strings: (text)" ( https://support.microsoft.com/... ). Some will render properly only in the post-Vista API, but not the pre-Vista API. Others will render properly only in the pre-Vista API, and not the post-Vista API. To my utter surprise and bafflement, event sources such as "Ntfs" and "mpio" fall into the category of rendering properly in pre-Vista API, but not post-Vista API... in Windows Server 2012. That's right, for some reason, the events of a couple of the most critical event sources could not be fixed.
Powershell is nice as a scripting language, but it's a bear as a command shell. There have been years of complaints of slow loading, especially on systems with high disk I/O activity and/or stalled disks (it doesn't even have to be the system drive; ANY stalled disk on a Windows system may cause Powershell to stall eternally until the system is rebooted; I've seen this for years, in Server 2008 as well as Server 2012). The main reasons why the Command Prompt hasn't been entirely supplanted is because it's lightweight, and has stood the test of time for over 2 decades in NT.
I recently changed careers from a mostly-Windows role to a mostly-Linux role, and it feels great to work with bash, even if I still haven't memorized most of the higher esoteric layers of shell scripting. It feels like the shell was designed for the OS, instead of being duct-taped into a jack-of-all-trades role. The way I log into a RDP-windowed Windows Server 2012 system is visual humor in itself: I right-click the taskbar to click "Task Manager", use it to open "File -> New Task", run "cmd.exe", maybe start Powershell off to the side, and don't EVER click on the Start corner (or button if it's 2012 R2) or the Charms bar. Control panel? Run "control". Computer management? "compmgmt.msc" still works. Search for a file? "dir /b /s" for it, or else creative uses of "find" will work. But don't EVER call up the abomination that is the Start Screen.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
rsync is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.