Posted on 10/19/2015 8:55:19 PM PDT by dayglored
Microsoft has published early source code for its OpenSSH-for-Windows port for developers to pick apart and improve.
In a blog post on Monday, Steve Lee – the PowerShell team's principal software engineer manager – said Redmond has finished early work on a Windows port of OpenSSH 7.1, built in a joint-effort with remote-access developer NoMachine.
"We will continue to partner with NoMachine on development in this public repository," Lee said. "Please note that this code is still very early and should be treated as a developer preview and is not supported for use in production."
Microsoft said back in June that it will integrate OpenSSH support into its Windows PowerShell tool, allowing admins to securely log into Windows boxes and remote-control them using the command line and scripts – just like they can with Linux, BSD and other Unix-y operating systems.
"Back in June, we announced our intentions to bring SSH to Windows by supporting and contributing to the OpenSSH community," Lee explained.
"Our objective was to not only port OpenSSH so that it worked well on Windows, but to openly contribute those changes back into the portable version of OpenSSH. Of the many options available, one clearly stood out: the previous work that NoMachine had already published in bringing OpenSSH to Windows.
"The NoMachine port was based on OpenSSH 5.9, so we’ve spent the time since our initial announcement working with NoMachine to bring this port in sync with OpenSSH 7.1."
Here's Redmond's rough road map for the OpenSSH port:
The BSD-or-freer-licensed source code can be downloaded from the project's GitHub repository.
SSH is Secure Shell -- the standard way to login to a remote system and execute commands, administer systems, and generally communicate. It's the fundamental access and control mechanism for most of the internet. Windows has been a holdout for decades because Microsoft wants you to use their GUI and that's all. Even Apple has had SSH on its OS X computers from the very beginning, and it's a useful and very common service on Macs.
Microsoft's arrogant and petulant attitude has hampered the acceptance and use of Windows in heterogeneous computing environments, and made work life hell for engineers, testers, and system admins.
Those of us who have had to use Windows in development work environments where SSH is the communications standard have had to install third-party products, notably Cygwin and similar utility packages, to bring OpenSSH to our Windows machines.
So for Microsoft to allow Windows to, at last, support a native OpenSSH service is a breath of fresh air like no other.
D-uh, did I ... ? yep, I wandered into a smart freepers thread.
My boo boo. I’ll let myself out.
Not really a "smart FReepers" thread. Just a thread of Windows users who are grateful that Microsoft is slowly, finally, seeing the light of day with regard to playing well with others in the modern world.
Yet another thing that would never have happened, if Ballmer was still in charge.
I never thought I’d see the day...
Okay .. for those of us who don’t speak in dots and dashes, could you explain what that might possibly mean to me ..??
See comment #3.
If all you ever do is run Office and a browser on Windows, you would never run into the situations where SSH is used.
But for decades, every operating system except Windows has had some form of SSH (or its predecessor, rsh) for communications.
The entire internet uses SSH for communications.
Except Windows.
It's been a major pain in the @$$ to all of us on the internet for decades.
And now, at last, it's being addressed.
Does that help?
If you never have occasion to "login" to a remote computer and get a "command line" prompt to issue commands, you don't need SSH.
If you don't know what a "Shell" is (in the context of giving command to a computer), you don't need SSH.
If you have never had reason to start a "Command Prompt" from your Windows computer, you don't need SSH.
And if you don't need SSH, you can safely ignore this whole thread. :-)
Yes it does. I never have a need for this SSH .. so I won’t worry about it.
Thanks; I really appreciate it .. It’s great to learn something new every day.
well look what they did with .NET Core 5...”open source is a key principal at Microsoft”. It’s a new day...
If they can make the setup easy, this will probably put a real crimp in the pocketbook of companies like Teamviewer.
Good for the bottom line?
Is this a part of the extend/extinguish mindset so common ay microsoft?
> Is this a part of the extend/extinguish mindset so common at microsoft?
This could be interpreted a few ways, of which Embrace-Extend-Extinguish is one. But I think EEE is unlikely, because it wouldn't succeed, and MS is not stupid in that regard. OpenSSL is used practically everywhere else; the rest of the world isn't going to drop OpenSSL just because Microsoft starts supporting SSH with their own libraries.
Possibility two is that MS looked at the recent history of vulnerabilities in OpenSSL that caused considerable headaches around the internet, and decided they didn't want their enterprise customers to suffer from that same problem in Windows -- it would be a black eye to the new SSH support even though strictly speaking unrelated. Using their own crypto gives them control over how new vulns are handled.
Third (put on your tinfoil hat for this one), if MS has developed crypto in cooperation with the NSA or other agencies that gives them a backdoor, then they have to use that crypto in something like SSH support.
I'll let you decide what you find the most probable.
That, and good PR too. System admins and power users have been clamouring for SSH support for decades. Lack of SSH has been a reason that a lot of admins and users didn't use Windows in applications where communications (other than remote desktop) was required.
Microsoft has demonstrated that they can be astonishingly stubborn and pig-headed. But that's changing, and I attribute most/all of the change to the departure of Ballmer. He ignored the bottom line concerns for over a decade due to his arrogance.
I figure the third scenerio is most likely, given how horrible microsoft has historically been with security in general and crypto specifically. Overall, I welcome microsoft entry into the 21st century. Perhaps they’ll catch up eventually.
I’m hoping we’ll finally be able to use scp and rsync on microsoft boxes. Rsync rocks.
Yah, mon.
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