“One of the first things that an admin wants to do with PowerShell [‘Monad’] is run remotely. To do this securely, you must encrypt your data. SSH has been the proven way to do this. So the question becomes, how do I connect SSH and PowerShell together? With a little bit of kludge, it is possible.”
I always forgot that windows doesn’t come with sshd…
Does PowerShell have any native remote capabilities? If I have two computers with PowerShell installed, can I connect them SSH-like with built-in Windows tools?
Tom
I noticed a 3rd party project called “PowerShell Remoting”.. Another site ( http://www.redmonk.com/cote/archives/2006/06/teched_2006_pow.html )mentions remote capabilities (similar to what we expect of SSH) to be available in the 1.1 release. I suppose for now the idea is to use RDC and open a terminal?!?
Remoting is a feature scheduled for a later release of PowerShell (v2, IIRC).
PowerShell is initially being staged across 3 releases, with the first aimed at standardizing the language and providing a stable, secure base supporting common scenarios. Subsequent releases will add other features like remoting and UI integration. There was a document on MSDN that provided some details on this, but I can’t find it currently.
Remote execution is currently handled by the cmdlets/scripts (as is done in Exchange 2007 or WMI).
For file access, you can login to the remote machine using “net use” or similar (if you don’t already have access), then “cd” to the remote share (e.g., “cd \\computername\sharename”). Powershell isn’t needed on the remote machine for these scenarios.
For scenarios such as executing a remote PowerShell instance, you’ll need to use TS/RDP or similar for now.
Edited 2006-07-11 19:56
Something like this really shouldn’t require Cygwin. I was going to call it a kludge, but it isn’t really… you’re just (eventually) running PowerShell like you would any normal shell.
NT/2000/XP have come with an unsecured telnetd for years, you’d think “the most secure Windows ever!” would come with sshd.
– chrish
this really shouldn’t require Cygwin.
True. But Cygwin is so good that I consider it essential for any Windows PC I must use. Which makes me wonder, since Cygwin delivers Bash via SSH from a Windows PC–why bother with the PowerShell at all?
… why bother with the PowerShell at all?
Monad is an object-oriented shell. It will do things that BASH won’t. Of course you may wish it didn’t do some of those things, but it’s still a work in progress. (o;
http://sshwindows.sourceforge.net/
I understand the Mono team can’t use the name “Monad” though it’s a natural extension of Mono. Therefore, I prose the GNU/GPL/Mono version of PowerShell be called Gonad and SuperpowerShell respectively. If they’ve the nuggets, that is.
PowerShallot. Because it makes you cry to use it.
Now that was funny.
Actually wouldn’t the correct spelling be, “gnad”.
SSH does not run under Windows natively. Microsofts tools are substandard, inferior by design and insecure. Nothing will change it, Windows Vista will not change it. PowerShell is nothing more than a BASH ripoff. Before you devote any more time to the sinking ship that is Microsoft, and Microsoft is dying as I know of no real professional developer or IT consultant that uses Windows, why not go free and use SLED and/or buy Mac OS X. Something that is worth the money. Windows isnt even worth whats paid for it. I havce used PowerShell and its nothing more than a joke.
As I understand from the various articles about Monad/PowerShell, it appears to be a functional rip-off of the old Amiga CLI. Namely, the object functionality is similar to some of the ARexx functionality (not syntactically, but functionally).
After reading this, I was set for a good rant on the lack of MS platform remote administrative capabilities – or lack thereof.
However, ChrisA beat me to it…well said.
Windows, as a server or desktop, is the most incompetent sea of code ever written.
A lot of the power of the .net framework (and hence Monad/powershell) is that it has inbuilt support for WMI, Remote Management (processes / services / users & groups / disk volumes /tasks etc) … hence you run a script locally that queries a remote machine – the same you do with vbscript? The WMI etc services on the target computer return the information.
Or have I missed the point?
You don’t use wmi to list the contents of a folder, for example…
I can type upwards to 100 words a minute, anytime I have to move my hands off the home row to the mouse, I am losing productivity.
Yes! This is the right perspective and the right issue. I get so very tired of the assumption that a GUI will somehow make me more productive.
Anytime I have to stream video, I am wasting bandwidth.
Right again.
Nice to hear the voice of sanity every once in a while, thanks.
PowerShell might eventually become a useful tool for Windows administration, but it’s by no mean revolutionary. For example, I’ve really enjoyed playing around with IPython and its pysh profile. It’s essentially an interactive shell that lets you mix Python code and your default shell commands together. It makes interactively creating, saving, editing and running python scripts so seamless that I find myself amassing quite a collection of little timesavers. It’s very much a work in progress, but then again so is PowerShell, and it seems like IPython is way more useful at the moment.
Yes, it runs on Windows and Mac OSX, too.
Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.
— Henry Spencer Usenet signature, November 1987
ha…I have to steal that one.
Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.
Those that do not undestand Monad (PowerShell) think it’s like Unix shells.
Monad works with objects. BIG difference and much better approach, IMHO.
Those that do not undestand Monad (PowerShell) think it’s like Unix shells.
The OP didn’t say it was “like Unix shells.” He implied it was like a poorly implemented UNIX shell.
Monad works with objects. BIG difference…
Again, the OP appears to have accounted for this with the use of the qualifying word “poorly”.
Obviously, both of you do not understand that Monad is not like Unix shell at all. Thus, it can not be “like poorly (or ‘like well’) implemented Unix shell.”
Another thing is, what is so poor about Monad?
I’ve been using it for almost six months now and it simply rocks. Maybe you should give it a try..
I would give it a go, but it seems to be designed only to run under very specific —some might say limited— environments.
Usually, people that say that (“..limited environments..”) — it is the same people that think Monad is “poorly implemented Unix shell”.
🙂
OK, I suppose you use Unices and I don’t see that you’ll miss PowerShell (Monad) there simply because Unix has its ways of doing things in shell (text goes through pipes) and everything is done that way already while Monad does it differently (objects go through pipes).
On Windows, it will make a huge difference especially because Microsoft is (slowly) going to support PowerShell with all its producs (for example, Exchange beta now fully supports Monad. You can do anything from Monad. Actually, Exchange GUI, IIRC, uses Monad to perform all tasks).
One last thing, if on my Windows I can run both bash (via Services for Unix, Cygwin, etc) and Monad, while one can not run both on, for example Linux, then I really have to ask — which environment is more limited?