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Looking Forward: Support for Secure Shell

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Re: Looking Forward: Support for Secure Shell

#301

Post by saulrh »

WalterBright wrote: post #298
cturner wrote: 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…

> there was no point under Gates or he at which Microsoft felt like a pro-developer company. That hasn't been my experience. Microsoft has always been supportive of my compiler company, even providing Microsoft tools to be bundled with it. In fact, a huge reason MSDOS was so enormously successful was the ease with which anyone could (and did) write and ship software for it. Microsoft was well aware of this and suppor…

There's a slight difference between "pro-developer" and "pro-company-that-develops-things". Microsoft has always provided excellent corporate support. If you have an issue and you're paying lots of money, Microsoft will move one and zero to fix your problem. Early and recent Microsofts, though, have a feeling that middle Microsoft didn't where they're friendly directly to the people writing the code. Better documentation, better quality-of-life features (ssh, headless, Visual Studio), more listening to the community. I mean, ssh? A build specifically intended for the raspberry pi form factor?

Re: Looking Forward: Support for Secure Shell

#302

Post by [deleted] »

halo wrote: post #163
wumbernang wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ab…

[deleted]

Re: Looking Forward: Support for Secure Shell

#303

Post by fallat »

Thetawaves wrote: post #286
cactusface wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

X11, KDE, GNOME, GCC, Emacs, Mozilla? Any huge project I guess. The GNU command line tools are not as lean as the BSD ones but so what?

They also generally have more (useful) features than the BSD ones.

Not only that but they include more documentation inside the binary. Someone also pointed out to me one time that some features in some GNU utils are only possible to have if they are implemented in the binary, rather as a separate program.

Re: Looking Forward: Support for Secure Shell

#304

Post by ptaipale »

new_hackers wrote: post #296
rsync wrote: post #132

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." I'm not sure I understand what you mean here ... My OS X desktop/laptop (for instance) have ssh on them, but I almost never ssh to them ... I just open up a local terminal window. Genuinely curious as to why one would ssh to their win…

Genuinely curious as to why one would use cmd.exe instead of PowerShell?

Because cmd.exe, or command.com, has been around for over 30 years, and lots of people have learned it. PowerShell is nice but a couple of decades overdue.

Re: Looking Forward: Support for Secure Shell

#305

Post by ptaipale »

josteink wrote: post #148
Alupis wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never thought I'd say this... but I can foresee a future release of Windows being touted as POSIX compliant.

It already was. In the NT days.

Yes, they even had a slogan "Windows NT is a better UNIX than UNIX".

Which never rang really true, but NT had promise.

Re: Looking Forward: Support for Secure Shell

#306

Post by beagle3 »

hammerandtongs wrote: post #50
e40 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're just trading sshd bugs for VPN bugs, in that case. Which are more likely? From what I know, I think I'll put my lot in with sshd. Perhaps I'm not well informed, though. Also, sshd + fwknop (port knocking) is a very secure combo, IMO.

With openvpn (which is just ssl) you can simply not respond when someone presents a bad key. openssh always responds (unless I've missed a recent feature) thus exposing which port its listening on and that you sent a bad key. The silent failure is preferable for this application. Port knocking gives you a roughly equivalent layer.

openvpn, which is just ssl, was vulnerable to heartbleed.

Like the GP said - you're trading VPN bugs for SSH bugs - and experience shows that betting on SSH is generally wiser.

If you only need TCP/DNS and not a full-blown VPN, a program called sshuttle uses ssh+python to provide excellent seamless poor man's VPN. It's not perfect - e.g., you lose the ip src address on the forwarded connections - but it works amazingly well, much better than e.g. openvpn and most other vpn products I've used.

Re: Looking Forward: Support for Secure Shell

#307

Post by lygaret »

sudioStudio64 wrote: post #277
pjc50 wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's like people don't even try to learn how it works It's much harder to know how it works, for some reason. Information like this doesn't make its way into the community and circulate. On a UNIX system you can poke around /etc and get an idea of the scope of what is configurable. The same is very much not true of the registry and only slightly true of WMI.

You are right. The guy that wrote PowerShell says that UNIX is document oriented configuration while windows is API oriented configuration. To get into it in any depth you have to approach windows programmatically. The most power is through C\C++...to be a good windows admin you need to read the docs about how you interact with different subsystems, even if you aren't going to code against them.

That's a really good point, thank you. I've never really thought about it that way; e.g. the registry is something you should sort of treat as an opaque blob of state (like a smalltalk image?) that you just mutate over time programatically, rather than as a declarative set of configurations to bring the machine to at any time.

Re: Looking Forward: Support for Secure Shell

#308

Post by lawnchair_larry »

jfuhrman wrote: post #204
digler999 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

What platform does not have 0-day security vulnerabilities? Hurd?

His comment didn't imply that other platforms don't have 0-day vulnerabilities.

Re: Looking Forward: Support for Secure Shell

#309

Post by lawnchair_larry »

wumbernang wrote: post #200
digler999 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yeah every 2 days I have to reboot all of our kit to apply updates... http://i.imgur.com/5ZxiLGf.png

Neglecting security is not a virtue.
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