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Looking Forward: Support for Secure Shell

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161–170 of 404 posts

Re: Looking Forward: Support for Secure Shell

#161

Wonderful. I am a big supporter of Powershell, and while Powershell has supported remoting since almost day one, it will never enjoy quite as much support as SSH already receives (e.g. third party tools, firewall support, etc). It is also nice that they're looking into using something fairly "proven" secure, OpenSSH is exposed to the internet a lot (even if, yes, that is not best practice) so we can reasonably expect…

I've been historically what can be described a Microsoft hater and I have to tell you, missing official SSH support has never been a hate generator and insinuating otherwise is insulting.

The first reason for which I have historically hated Microsoft is because of how they fought open standards. I can't believe that Microsoft changed in any meaningful way when I can't get a Lumia phone or Outlook to work with CalDAV / CardDAV. And that's just one current annoyance, as we can always talk about ODF, OpenGL and others.

The second reason for why I hated Microsoft is for their funding of SCO's lawsuit for the ownership of Unix. That was a long time ago, they must have changed right? Except that currently they are behaving like a patent troll, extracting profit out of Android through what can be described as racketeering, more profit than they do from Windows Phone.

The third reason for why I now hate Microsoft is for how they are (again) pushing for Trusted Computing. It's basically what happens when the OS provider becomes the gatekeeper of what you can install and do with your own computer. I never took this as a threat to personal computing, except that now Apple has made it acceptable. Things like insisting on logging in with Microsoft accounts, or only being able to install "modern apps" through their store (while taking a revenue cut of course) would have been unthinkable only 10 years ago. So thanks Apple for shifting the overton window, thanks Microsoft for delivering it to PCs.

Of course, "hate" is a strong word. I don't really hate them, I just speak against them. But given how people fill the forums lately with messages of the second coming, I'm wondering what the heck are these people smoking, because I want some.

Re: Looking Forward: Support for Secure Shell

#162
post #117

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=2391 If I am forced to use Windows in an Enterprise setting, then I just go to Control Panel and enable the POSIX layer ("SUA"), then download the SDK and install. With some minor changes to the %Path, it just works. SUA has older versions of tcsh, ksh, vi and many other utilities, including an older Perl and an old GCC toolchain that does work. It is 4.2BSD bas…

I just download GnuWin which gives you most Unix tools compiled natively for Win32. Includes OpenSSH too.

http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/

Re: Looking Forward: Support for Secure Shell

#163
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Wishlist: tmux, emacs, vi, netcat, shell option for vi-mode, rc-file with preferences, ncurses library, something simpler than curses, zip and unzip No thankyou. I can certainly understand including SSH support, but I don't want what is pretty much the only remaining viable non-Unix platform to start bundling horribly dated and clunky Unix-like commands and bloated GNU tools.

Couldn't agree more. As a die hard Unix guy and ex Slashdot-esque zealot (colloquially a bit of a twat). Yet I'm knocking out PowerShell all the time now and dread having to log into the pile of CentOS kit I have lying around. It is arcane. Even after 15 years I spend most of my time in the manpages or working out another damn config format. Literally did a two liner to scrape a web page, parse it and call a REST end…

I'm not even a Powershell fan, I'm just not especially fond of Unix-likes, which feel like a local maximum that has turned into an unchangable standard. I think Unix-like environments feel dated, clunky and there's a tendancy for it to result in permanent bloat, stagnation and a web of interdependencies.

I understand that lots of people are familiar with Unix-like tools and their many idiosyncrasies and like to be able to transfer that knowledge across platforms. But that doesn't mean there isn't merit to a platform not conforming to that and trying to improve on it.

Re: Looking Forward: Support for Secure Shell

#164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hmm. They can now have a path to obsolete cmd. As long as they ship a decent ssh client with the system, users will become accustomed to ssh-ing to their own box instead of using cmd. Baby steps! SSH is a transport protocol, not a shell. If you SSH to your own box, you're just going to get PowerShell.

SSH clients are also typically terminal emulators, though. The idea here would be to have an ssh client which acts as a better terminal than cmd.exe does. The effect of this isn't about whether you get access to a better shell, but instead about whether you have a better terminal with which to talk to that shell.

FYI: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/Console2ABetterWindowsCommandP...

Will happily run a cmd window, or other command you supply (e.g. I run a cygwin zsh)

Re: Looking Forward: Support for Secure Shell

#165
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Wishlist: tmux, emacs, vi, netcat, shell option for vi-mode, rc-file with preferences, ncurses library, something simpler than curses, zip and unzip No thankyou. I can certainly understand including SSH support, but I don't want what is pretty much the only remaining viable non-Unix platform to start bundling horribly dated and clunky Unix-like commands and bloated GNU tools.

Couldn't agree more. As a die hard Unix guy and ex Slashdot-esque zealot (colloquially a bit of a twat). Yet I'm knocking out PowerShell all the time now and dread having to log into the pile of CentOS kit I have lying around. It is arcane. Even after 15 years I spend most of my time in the manpages or working out another damn config format. Literally did a two liner to scrape a web page, parse it and call a REST end…

> The only thing I still hate is windows update.

all those "2 liners" don't mean much if you have to reboot your box every 2 days to apply more emergency 0-day security patches.

Re: Looking Forward: Support for Secure Shell

#166
I wish Windows just became a POSIX compliant OS. I think that would solve a lot of these smaller issues in an elegant way. Apple did a very smart job with Mac OS X, to the point where even I switched to a Mac after having Linux for so many years. It's incredible how I can install packages using homebrew and friends..

Come on Microsoft, go all the way!

Re: Looking Forward: Support for Secure Shell

#167

I happily await the day when I no longer need to install PuTTY on all of my fresh Windows installs.

In a recent HN thread, someone pointed me to MobaXterm ( http://mobaxterm.mobatek.net/ ) and I have gladly deleted PuTTY.

I use console2, with a cygwin zsh, and then run command line ssh inside that. Sounds a bit convoluted, but works really well and gives me the experience I desire, where remote shells and local ones look and act the same.

Re: Looking Forward: Support for Secure Shell

#168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should microsoft just make their primary commercial product free for everyone? I am curious to know what percentage of MS profit is from OS sales, but I assume it's very high? Apple can make their OS free cause they make money on the hardware, which 99% of people buy from them to run the OS on. And of course linux and other open source is another story.

I don't think microsoft makes that much money from customers buying their OS directly, but rather from OEMs installing Windows by default on the laptops/desktops they are selling. Never once have I met a person buying a standalone windows upgrade/windows OS. Either they end up buying a new computer, they stick with whatever was installed on their computer (hello, XP/Vista users), or they illegally download the upgrad…

They definitely sell retail copies of Windows, and someone must be buying them, or else I can't imagine the retailers would bother stocking them.

For example, a good amount of the people that have Macs also need to run Windows virtual machines (or Bootcamp), and the primary way to do that is to buy a retail copy of Windows. I can't imagine that's a very high percentage of revenue, but I wouldn't say that nobody buys Windows directly.

Re: Looking Forward: Support for Secure Shell

#169
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Wishlist: tmux, emacs, vi, netcat, shell option for vi-mode, rc-file with preferences, ncurses library, something simpler than curses, zip and unzip No thankyou. I can certainly understand including SSH support, but I don't want what is pretty much the only remaining viable non-Unix platform to start bundling horribly dated and clunky Unix-like commands and bloated GNU tools.

Couldn't agree more. As a die hard Unix guy and ex Slashdot-esque zealot (colloquially a bit of a twat). Yet I'm knocking out PowerShell all the time now and dread having to log into the pile of CentOS kit I have lying around. It is arcane. Even after 15 years I spend most of my time in the manpages or working out another damn config format. Literally did a two liner to scrape a web page, parse it and call a REST end…

> Literally did a two liner to scrape a web page, parse it and call a REST endpoint with the parsed data as JSON in PowerShell.

This sounds cool. Can you recommend terse resources for getting to know PowerShell? Is MSDN the best place to look for docs or are there better places to go?

Re: Looking Forward: Support for Secure Shell

#170
post #60

For all Balmer's thing of dancing on a stage and chanting "developers", there was no point under Gates or he at which Microsoft felt like a pro-developer company. That has completely changed in the last eighteen months. Each time I think "wouldn't it be cool if" I'm finding a few weeks later that someone at Microsoft is well ahead of me. How much easier it will be to ship my sucky roguelikes to Windows users in this…

Supporting developers means making their lives easy by giving them streamlined systems and frameworks, not throwing a hodge-podge of of command line utilities at them or exposing them to the messy bazaar of the FOSS world. I'd say Microsoft has been been more pro-developer than most and I'm super glad that I chose to live primarily in their ecosystem because they make my life easy compared to the mess I have to put u…

I appreciate the courage of posting what seems like an unpopular opinion, but I can't agree with you. The messy bazaar of the FOSS world has been overlapping with the Windows ecosystem for some time, even high profile projects from Microsoft like ASP.NET MVC have been open source for years now.
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