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 new world!
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.
Wishlist: tmux, emacs, vi, netcat, shell option for vi-mode, rc-file with preferences, ncurses library, something simpler than curses, zip and unzip. 256 colour is fine, although 24-bit would be impressive. /proc would be cool, but also a big ask I assume. They already have a strong compiler. Make it really easy to find the hex fingerprint required to log on to the sshd-server. Something like inetd could be useful, too.
>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.
> 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.
> 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 supported it.
"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 windows system rather than just run cmd.exe ...
> Wishlist: tmux, emacs, vi, netcat, shell option for vi-mode, rc-file with preferences, ncurses library, something simpler than curses, zip and unzip.
First, let's have a copy tool with delta-sync support. I can't believe I have to use a cygwin-based rsync to quickly update my backups throughout the day (currently: shut down Virtualbox dev VM, rsync changes, start VM).
I understand the MS way to do it is DSFR, but for a single developer workstation that's overkill.
Yesterday only I was talking with my friend about "Would Microsoft will ever support ssh?" and voila its done.
I am a linux guy who did his intern in Microsoft. That was the first time I appreciated Powershell and from then I am in love with it. Its object oriented nature makes thing easy, fluid, understandable. I can never run linux command line with Google but with Powershell, its possible with the way it manages help pages.
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 up with in Unix-land.
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 it to withstand day to day attacks.
In general people really are starting to run out of reasons to "hate" Microsoft. It will be interesting to see what they come up with in the future...
PS - I really hope later they expand this to SFTP support. SFTP is significantly better than either FTP or FTPS, and something Windows has lacked since forever.
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.
> In general people really are starting to run out of reasons to "hate" Microsoft. It will be interesting to see what they come up with in the future...
I agree with you overall, MS has made GREAT strides in the last year towards moving my needle from "Wouldn't touch if my life depended on it" to "Huh, that's actually pretty interesting". The old MS still shows through with things like how they are handling Win 10 (Both in versions and cost) but overall they are looking up. That said MS still has a long ways to go and I still wouldn't use Windows for anything (other than gaming) but some other stuff MS has done does interest me.
SYSLOG! For the love of god, please support syslog! I work as a consultant supporting a SIEM, and the amount of hoops we need to jump through to get logs from Windows servers is crazy compared to changing one line in a syslog.conf file. I actually dread when a client says "we're an all Windows environment" because wow initial setup just got that much harder.
And if we want to install a syslog forwarder on their domain controllers... no one ever trusts software installed on their domain controllers. Everyone trusts a single line in syslog.conf.
> Given our changes in leadership and culture, we decided to give it another try and this time, because we are able to show the clear and compelling customer value, the company is very supportive.
Is that code for Ballmer's regime vs Nadella's regime?
This has been my long time dream. There's so little that prevents this from happening theoretically (obviously there's a lot of coding will be done, but hey that's the fun part). I am very glad Microsoft is taking all the right steps to bring two world closer: Linux and Windows.
With all the announcements around stuff like Docker for Windows Server Containers and cross platform .NET, this was nearly inevitable. Now the server management also steers in the right direction.
Disclaimer: ms employee doing tons of open source.
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 based. If you are at home on BSD, it is like going back in time.
netcat, tmux, emacs, etc. you would have compile yourself. Maybe OpenSSH would compile and run. I have not tried.
Perhaps an alternative to Cygwin, etc. Not "better" but different. It generally "seems" faster and I find it's more difficult to "break" than Cygwin which in my experience can be very "delicate". The SUA White Paper says SUA comes to within 10% of the speed of native Windows.
The main advantage though, for me, is that this is not "unauthorized third party software" to the extent it comes with Windows and the SDK download comes from Microsoft's Akamai account.
OH THANK GOD. I'm using Ansible to manage Windows, and today that means fooling around with WinRM. For example, that involved adding Kerberos support to Ansible so that it could authenticate against Windows domain accounts, because those are authed differently from local machine accounts.
Assuming the project succeeds this time around, it's going to be way easier to incorporate Windows servers into Unix-centric management systems. That's a huge benefit to DevOps and Microsoft. Thanks!
Hallelujah... new package manager, modular install, and now ssh?
What's left? Perhaps a real terminal?
To bad this won't make it into Win 10, unless I misunderstood something. Looks like my days of sneering at Windows as a toy are numbered... end of an era, and it makes me a bit sad, sniff.
"Those who don't understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly." – Henry Spencer
Basically, bit by bit it seems Microsoft are realising there is a ton of stuff they need to take from the unix environment.
The comments here about how awesome PowerShell and the other tools within all are seem to focus on everything being an object rather than being text.
So, we could fix that by basically providing a "Ruby shell" in one sweep. You go through the standard utilities you have on unix systems, provide them as Ruby methods on various objects (the Ruby stdlib has a great many) and provide a means to navigate a file system easily, and basically you have the beginnings of an object-orientated shell with the support of the traditional 30+ year old command line utilities.
What is it I am missing? This feels all a little reminiscent of when Microsoft got all giddy about providing symbolic links... well... yeah... I mean... what?
Finally! PowerShell Remoting just plain sucks, at least it has for me. I've always wondered why the PowerShell developer(s?) would do something so needlessly contrived when SSH has been around for, like, twenty years or so.
This will definitely make my job easier! Or at least more convenient.
"I've always wondered why the PowerShell developers ..." Think about the beginning of that sentence. They invented a new console language, when bash has been around forever and C# is a better programming language generally and can be run as a scripted language with a little finagling.
I don't think the PS team is bad (or PS itself for that matter), I just think there was a lot of re-inventing of the wheel for no reason, and that started way upstream of remoting.
How about a terminal window you can resize with the mouse, and effortlessly cut and paste text, and with tab completion that doesn't do weird inexplicable things? Do they have that yet?
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..
I think homebrew and MacPorts are niche though. Your "normal" OSX user wouldn't install them. Heck, I ran Linux for years and years and I haven't even installed them under OSX because if I wanted to run BSD or Linux, I'd have installed BSD or Linux.
It's like installing all those GNU tools on Windows to make it more like Linux, and putting Homebrew etc. on OSX to make it more like Linux. Why not just use Linux or BSD? I never understand it.
Also, the lack of proper Quartz windowing support from X11 apps makes using them painful.
Back when I interned at MS in 2013, people were alarmed when I spoke to users on some forums about their complaints because I was designing a related feature. We had to check with legal whether I would have to delete all my posts!
Good news! WinRM is a massive pain. The hoops you have to go through to bootstrap a fresh Windows image to get to the point you can run PowerShell is crazy.
As a Windows admin and long time GNU/Linux / BSD user, I would totally love to replace every single Windows at our company with a Unixoid system. But there's a lot of software we use that either is not available on non-Windows platforms, where no decent replacement exists and/or migration is considered to expensive. If, say, Autodesk ported their software to some free Unixoid system, that would go a long way. But AFAIK, that is not going to happen anytime soon.
[+] [-] cturner|10 years ago|reply
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 new world!
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.
Wishlist: tmux, emacs, vi, netcat, shell option for vi-mode, rc-file with preferences, ncurses library, something simpler than curses, zip and unzip. 256 colour is fine, although 24-bit would be impressive. /proc would be cool, but also a big ask I assume. They already have a strong compiler. Make it really easy to find the hex fingerprint required to log on to the sshd-server. Something like inetd could be useful, too.
[+] [-] halo|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] claudiusd|10 years ago|reply
Baby steps! SSH is a transport protocol, not a shell. If you SSH to your own box, you're just going to get PowerShell.
[+] [-] WalterBright|10 years ago|reply
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 supported it.
[+] [-] rsync|10 years ago|reply
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 windows system rather than just run cmd.exe ...
[+] [-] astazangasta|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baldfat|10 years ago|reply
mobaxterm - http://mobaxterm.mobatek.net/
[+] [-] pbowyer|10 years ago|reply
First, let's have a copy tool with delta-sync support. I can't believe I have to use a cygwin-based rsync to quickly update my backups throughout the day (currently: shut down Virtualbox dev VM, rsync changes, start VM).
I understand the MS way to do it is DSFR, but for a single developer workstation that's overkill.
[+] [-] h43k3r|10 years ago|reply
I am a linux guy who did his intern in Microsoft. That was the first time I appreciated Powershell and from then I am in love with it. Its object oriented nature makes thing easy, fluid, understandable. I can never run linux command line with Google but with Powershell, its possible with the way it manages help pages.
[+] [-] Alupis|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WorldWideWayne|10 years ago|reply
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 up with in Unix-land.
[+] [-] hockeybias|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Someone1234|10 years ago|reply
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 it to withstand day to day attacks.
In general people really are starting to run out of reasons to "hate" Microsoft. It will be interesting to see what they come up with in the future...
PS - I really hope later they expand this to SFTP support. SFTP is significantly better than either FTP or FTPS, and something Windows has lacked since forever.
[+] [-] bad_user|10 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] joshstrange|10 years ago|reply
I agree with you overall, MS has made GREAT strides in the last year towards moving my needle from "Wouldn't touch if my life depended on it" to "Huh, that's actually pretty interesting". The old MS still shows through with things like how they are handling Win 10 (Both in versions and cost) but overall they are looking up. That said MS still has a long ways to go and I still wouldn't use Windows for anything (other than gaming) but some other stuff MS has done does interest me.
[+] [-] freehunter|10 years ago|reply
And if we want to install a syslog forwarder on their domain controllers... no one ever trusts software installed on their domain controllers. Everyone trusts a single line in syslog.conf.
[+] [-] insertnickname|10 years ago|reply
Please elaborate.
[+] [-] totony|10 years ago|reply
Are you talking about firewall easy-to-setup?
[+] [-] atonse|10 years ago|reply
Is that code for Ballmer's regime vs Nadella's regime?
[+] [-] ahmetmsft|10 years ago|reply
With all the announcements around stuff like Docker for Windows Server Containers and cross platform .NET, this was nearly inevitable. Now the server management also steers in the right direction.
Disclaimer: ms employee doing tons of open source.
[+] [-] ised|10 years ago|reply
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 based. If you are at home on BSD, it is like going back in time.
netcat, tmux, emacs, etc. you would have compile yourself. Maybe OpenSSH would compile and run. I have not tried.
Perhaps an alternative to Cygwin, etc. Not "better" but different. It generally "seems" faster and I find it's more difficult to "break" than Cygwin which in my experience can be very "delicate". The SUA White Paper says SUA comes to within 10% of the speed of native Windows.
The main advantage though, for me, is that this is not "unauthorized third party software" to the extent it comes with Windows and the SDK download comes from Microsoft's Akamai account.
[+] [-] zokier|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wvenable|10 years ago|reply
http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/
[+] [-] seabrookmx|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rbanffy|10 years ago|reply
I am almost tempted to congratulate Microsoft and welcome them to 1995, although I am quite sure Cygwin didn't have ssh back then.
[+] [-] AdmiralAsshat|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] squiguy7|10 years ago|reply
https://twitter.com/damienmiller/status/605865246016692225
[+] [-] kstrauser|10 years ago|reply
Assuming the project succeeds this time around, it's going to be way easier to incorporate Windows servers into Unix-centric management systems. That's a huge benefit to DevOps and Microsoft. Thanks!
[+] [-] mixmastamyk|10 years ago|reply
What's left? Perhaps a real terminal?
To bad this won't make it into Win 10, unless I misunderstood something. Looks like my days of sneering at Windows as a toy are numbered... end of an era, and it makes me a bit sad, sniff.
[+] [-] PaulRobinson|10 years ago|reply
Basically, bit by bit it seems Microsoft are realising there is a ton of stuff they need to take from the unix environment.
The comments here about how awesome PowerShell and the other tools within all are seem to focus on everything being an object rather than being text.
So, we could fix that by basically providing a "Ruby shell" in one sweep. You go through the standard utilities you have on unix systems, provide them as Ruby methods on various objects (the Ruby stdlib has a great many) and provide a means to navigate a file system easily, and basically you have the beginnings of an object-orientated shell with the support of the traditional 30+ year old command line utilities.
What is it I am missing? This feels all a little reminiscent of when Microsoft got all giddy about providing symbolic links... well... yeah... I mean... what?
[+] [-] krylon|10 years ago|reply
This will definitely make my job easier! Or at least more convenient.
[+] [-] bigdubs|10 years ago|reply
I don't think the PS team is bad (or PS itself for that matter), I just think there was a lot of re-inventing of the wheel for no reason, and that started way upstream of remoting.
[+] [-] nsxwolf|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] graffitici|10 years ago|reply
Come on Microsoft, go all the way!
[+] [-] 72deluxe|10 years ago|reply
It's like installing all those GNU tools on Windows to make it more like Linux, and putting Homebrew etc. on OSX to make it more like Linux. Why not just use Linux or BSD? I never understand it.
Also, the lack of proper Quartz windowing support from X11 apps makes using them painful.
[+] [-] insulanian|10 years ago|reply
But don't get lazy! We still need state of the art terminal!
[+] [-] zokier|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neil_s|10 years ago|reply
Back when I interned at MS in 2013, people were alarmed when I spoke to users on some forums about their complaints because I was designing a related feature. We had to check with legal whether I would have to delete all my posts!
[+] [-] techdragon|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] homulilly|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] w8rbt|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jsingleton|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Yaggo|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] krylon|10 years ago|reply