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Since this is all remote powershell, it would be nice if MS/Windows introduced a native SSH server. That would probably help drive some conversion for people us

Since this is all remote powershell, it would be nice if MS/Windows introduced a native SSH server. That would probably help drive some conversion for people used to the posix world.

olavgg 12y ago
This!!!! One of the biggest things I really miss in Windows-land is SSH. Just today I had to create a SSH tunnel for SQL Server. While it's not a big issue with third party tools, it should just be built and ready for use as with every Linux distro, FreeBSD, Solaris and OSX.
dordoka 12y ago
While they are at it, they could create a posix compatible layer for Windows. That would really drive some conversion. edit: after rereading my comment and seeing the downvotes, just to clarify, it was a serious, not negative suggestion. :)
- emodendroket 12y ago
  They've done that before and, as far as I know, it was not an extremely popular product.
  - stormbrew 12y ago
    It was not an extremely functional product. It was largely there to get government contracts where one of the requirements was POSIX conformance, even if they weren't using it.
    - emodendroket 12y ago
      Imagining they had first-class support for it (a major undertaking, I'd guess, but anyway) how many people would use it? I'd guess it'd be about the same people who use Cygwin now.
      - rbanffy 12y ago
        Anyone porting applications from Linux would be able to use it to reduce the effort.
        emodendroket 12y ago
        Yes, but I think Microsoft's ultimate concern is how many people will want to use such applications. How many will? Think about how few people run, say, PHP applications under Windows. Even though it's possible. (Well, actually, often it won't work right because PHP developers don't bother to test with anything besides Linux)
      - stormbrew 12y ago
        Why would you guess that? Because cygwin is nothing close to first class support. It has a lot of friction associated with its use. You're better off just running linux in a vm if you want posix on windows, and trust me plenty of people do that these days.
- tkmcc 12y ago
  There used to be Windows Services for UNIX (a.k.a. Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Services_for_UNIX http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Services_for_UNIX https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc771470.aspx https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc771470.aspx
  - mushiake 12y ago
    They ditched in Windows Server 2012. Now recommend cygwin. "The Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications (SUA) is deprecated. If you use the SUA POSIX subsystem with this release, use Hyper-V to virtualize the server. If you use the tools provided by SUA, switch to Cygwin's POSIX emulation, or use either mingw-w64 (available from Sourceforge.net) or MinGW (available from MinGW.org) for doing a native port. " https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh831568.aspx https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh831568.aspx
    - DiabloD3 12y ago
      msys2 is a lot better than mingw+msys and cygwin, in my opinion. I switched months ago and its been a lot easier to deal with.
quotemstr 12y ago
In order to make a native SSH server, Windows need pseudoconsoles (analogous to pseudoterminals in POSIXland). That is, it must be possible for a random program to create a handle that supports operations like SetConsoleCursorPosition without having to call AllocConsole. Calling AllocConsole is a problem because there's no way to monitor what programs are doing with that console except scraping it. (The accessibility hooks are insufficient because if you try to access the console from inside them, you deadlock, and if you queue an access request for later, you race.) Since consoles are real kernel objects since Windows 8 and talk to conhost over IPC anyway, this feature is eminently doable. It's been my top feature requests for years. Nobody's gotten around to it. Pseudoconsoles would be a bit more complicated than POSIX pseudoterminals because Windows consoles have more features, but the basic concept would transplant beautifully. It'd also make Cygwin a lot better. I miss working on operating systems.
jamra 12y ago
I think with Azure, you can log into your Azure instance and then send commands. I recently tried to set up automated deployments for our non-Azure infrastructure and investigated bringing things to Azure. It's not the same as SSH, but then again powershell is not the same as linux shells.

Since this is all remote powershell, it would be nice if MS/Windows introduced a native SSH server. That would probably help drive some conversion for people used to the posix world.

olavgg 12y ago

This!!!! One of the biggest things I really miss in Windows-land is SSH. Just today I had to create a SSH tunnel for SQL Server. While it's not a big issue with third party tools, it should just be built and ready for use as with every Linux distro, FreeBSD, Solaris and OSX.

dordoka 12y ago

While they are at it, they could create a posix compatible layer for Windows. That would really drive some conversion. edit: after rereading my comment and seeing the downvotes, just to clarify, it was a serious, not negative suggestion. :)

emodendroket 12y ago
They've done that before and, as far as I know, it was not an extremely popular product.
- stormbrew 12y ago
  It was not an extremely functional product. It was largely there to get government contracts where one of the requirements was POSIX conformance, even if they weren't using it.
  - emodendroket 12y ago
    Imagining they had first-class support for it (a major undertaking, I'd guess, but anyway) how many people would use it? I'd guess it'd be about the same people who use Cygwin now.
    - rbanffy 12y ago
      Anyone porting applications from Linux would be able to use it to reduce the effort.
      - emodendroket 12y ago
        Yes, but I think Microsoft's ultimate concern is how many people will want to use such applications. How many will? Think about how few people run, say, PHP applications under Windows. Even though it's possible. (Well, actually, often it won't work right because PHP developers don't bother to test with anything besides Linux)
    - stormbrew 12y ago
      Why would you guess that? Because cygwin is nothing close to first class support. It has a lot of friction associated with its use. You're better off just running linux in a vm if you want posix on windows, and trust me plenty of people do that these days.
tkmcc 12y ago
There used to be Windows Services for UNIX (a.k.a. Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Services_for_UNIX http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Services_for_UNIX https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc771470.aspx https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc771470.aspx
- mushiake 12y ago
  They ditched in Windows Server 2012. Now recommend cygwin. "The Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications (SUA) is deprecated. If you use the SUA POSIX subsystem with this release, use Hyper-V to virtualize the server. If you use the tools provided by SUA, switch to Cygwin's POSIX emulation, or use either mingw-w64 (available from Sourceforge.net) or MinGW (available from MinGW.org) for doing a native port. " https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh831568.aspx https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh831568.aspx
  - DiabloD3 12y ago
    msys2 is a lot better than mingw+msys and cygwin, in my opinion. I switched months ago and its been a lot easier to deal with.

quotemstr 12y ago

In order to make a native SSH server, Windows need pseudoconsoles (analogous to pseudoterminals in POSIXland). That is, it must be possible for a random program to create a handle that supports operations like SetConsoleCursorPosition without having to call AllocConsole. Calling AllocConsole is a problem because there's no way to monitor what programs are doing with that console except scraping it. (The accessibility hooks are insufficient because if you try to access the console from inside them, you deadlock, and if you queue an access request for later, you race.) Since consoles are real kernel objects since Windows 8 and talk to conhost over IPC anyway, this feature is eminently doable. It's been my top feature requests for years. Nobody's gotten around to it. Pseudoconsoles would be a bit more complicated than POSIX pseudoterminals because Windows consoles have more features, but the basic concept would transplant beautifully. It'd also make Cygwin a lot better. I miss working on operating systems.

jamra 12y ago

I think with Azure, you can log into your Azure instance and then send commands. I recently tried to set up automated deployments for our non-Azure infrastructure and investigated bringing things to Azure. It's not the same as SSH, but then again powershell is not the same as linux shells.