Contributed by Dengue on from the Windows-2000-magazine dept.
There's a brief mention of OpenBSD, and pretty decent discussion of using OpenSSH under windows (with the help of Cygwin). In fact - it's practially a pure OpenSSH article; so much so that the author, Mark Bradshaw, doesn't even discuss alternative daemons or clients, not even the popular puTTY. I was pretty taken aback to see this sort of coverage in a windows mag; I guess even some more mainstream tech journalists are waking up to the good stuff that our OpenBSD pals are doing.
I suppose this sorta thing is more appropriate under the /press.html on the main websites (openbsd.org/openssh.com) but I thought I'd toss it out here too."
(Comments are closed)
By Anonymous Coward () on
I reckon though they should've mentioned tunneling VNC over SSH too for free crossplatform GUI stuff.
By Ryan Cooley () on
There are many reasons for this.
1. You can't just bang out a cygwin compilation of OpenSSH and be free and clear... Configuring the Unix and the Windows side of things can get quite complex. Network Simplicity's at least has some docs on what to do to configure the conf file, and password file to work under Windows, and it installs OpenSSH as a service so it will always be running when you need it.
2. SWITCH.EXE is a program written by the Network Simplicity guys to address a windows problem (SCP). It checks if you are connecting through SSH or SCP/SFTP and gives you a command prompt or a Unix shell respectively (I haven't found any other Win OpenSSH implimentations that support SCP at all).
3. It's much easier than doing this any other way!
Cons of Windows OpenSSH
1.OpenSSH on Windows has some limitations it's commercial counterparts do not suffer from. For one, CygWin doesn't have very good console support. If you SSH to a windows box, then run EDIT, you'll be doing a lot of nothing. It just can't handle the interactive apps like F-Secure and others can.
2. OpenSSH on windows makes changing drives much more interesting. You configure mount points for each drive you want to access, which is quite confusing to pure-windows users. This is not to mention that SCP just barely works even when you've configured it correctly because of these Unix incompatibilities.
3. And finally, CygWin just isn't secure. It's nice to have an OpenSSH option for Windows, but CygWin is known to be inherently insecure, so you can't use OpenSSH for anything but remote administration (where the users don't have anything more to gain).
By Tronitikian () on
Or maybe I meant... "Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research" yeah, thanks acronymfinder.com! Way to cover my tracks, har har.
Sorry, off topic a bit. Anyway, neat, that networksimplicity stuff looks decent too. I must admit I was mostly interested in the article for the mention of OpenSSH/BSD. However if -I- ever need to implement sshd under Windows - it's good to have options, even if I would focus on ports of tools I already use elsewhere... hermm.
By Kriston () me@kriston.net on http://kriston.net/