Windows 1803 Update Turns on SSH | Hacker News Reader

Windows 1803 Update Turns on SSH

bleepingcomputer.com

79 pointsgilnims50 comments

Let's take this moment to acknowledge PuTTY, which has been serving our SSH client needs in the former barren-*nix-utility wasteland of Windows since 1999.

Thanks, Simon Tatham & the maintainers of PuTTY.

RIP my need for PuTTY going forward though, really. I guess I probably still need PuTTY for console cable maybe?

But yes, hat tip to one incredibly handy piece of software.

It's still the only SSH client I know that can change most of its settings during an existing session, especially in a cross-platform way (it is available for Linux). Good software indeed.

Forgive me for a dumb question, but I'm trying to be helpful.

Are you talking about tunnels and port forwards?

OpenSSH can do that - you type in an escape sequence and you can work your magic on the fly.

Just wanted to thank you for this answer. I never knew about OpenSSH escape sequences and I've used ssh for years.

https://pleiades.ucsc.edu/hyades/SSH_Escape_Sequences

No, I'm talking about a lot more settings than that including things about terminal emulation and keyboards. Next time you use PuTTY, try opening up the settings window for an existing session and see how many can be changed without having to restart afresh.

Some of these could be changed in various more disjointed ways in Linux or Windows, but it's nicely unified and cross-platform in PuTTY.

I'll admit I rarely leverage this flexibility, but it's cool enough that it seemed worth noting in this sub-thread about singing PuTTY's well-deserved praises.

PuTTY is a real window, not that /subystem:console garbage that you can barely cut&paste from. Granted the console has gotten better in Windows 10, but still not nearly as good as a real window like PuTTY gives you. I'll probably keep using PuTTY for this reason.

Not sure what you are missing in the Windows 10 console. Granted, for their entire history Microsoft have shipped junk console, but that is simply not the case anymore.

It was almost usable in Windows 10, but the latest update broke cut and paste for me.

It’s still not great and it’s a lot slower than putty.

You can use ConEmu instead of the stock console.

cmd is pretty darn fast. PowerShell leaves a lot to be desired on the performance end though, takes a few seconds to load up the prompt. :/

Powershell 6 has a way faster start time.

https://github.com/mikemaccana/powershell-profile/blob/maste...

It's getting a lot better but still not what I'd call remotely polished compared to iterm2 on mac, or even terminal.

Copy/paste is still somewhat janky, as well as window resizing and the like. If you move a window around now and hit enter in the console, it resizes the window vs. terminal. Just little things like that which make it much less productive than current alternatives.

I basically still rank it as a "decent emergency shell" but not something I'd use for a daily workflow.

I hope it gets better. My goal 2 years or so ago was to ditch securecrt so I could use a mosh client - but windows terminal was nowhere near good enough both for hi-dpi support as well as just decent 256 color support.

It's come a long way since then, we'll see if the trend can continue!

I don't use mac, but up to windows 10 it was annoying moving from linux to windows, but it's honestly not anymore.

Thanks for reminding me of securecrt, that's a piece of software I totally forgot about, ditched it about the same time I ditched my CRT monitor...

Resizing the windows console resizes the terminal, not the windows, I mean it rearrange the text, is this not what you mean?

I use windows in a VM, copy paste is near immidiate, and selection works nearly perfect (Microsoft does tend to over select spaces around words, that's an annoyance they carry all over the place).

The speed of text printing in the console is fairly fast too, but I didn't benchmarked it.

Haven't looked on color support at all, color themes are obvious weak point compared with any decent linux terminal.

ConEmu solves this problem really well. I use it on almost every windows machine I have.

Are you being serious or trolling? How on earth can you consider PUTTY's only copy/paste functionality of "Copy literally the whole fucking screen to the clipboard" as better than Windows 10's actual copy/paste functionality?

Granted, for most cut/paste operations, PuTTY falls way short of the mark. However, where I like PuTTY over other SSH terminal windows is the ability to grab entire router/switch configs easily. When it comes to in-depth SSH stuff, I prefer using a *nix VM which offers up more functionality. Lastly, I posted this article because I was completely aghast when I learned Microsoft had not only installed an SSH client but also began accepting connections natively, without the user's knowledge.

Same here, and I'd like to thank the developer(s) of KiTTY, too!

Wow, I didn't realize putty was so new in 99. I just used it because I needed a set of good client tools on my windows box.

Many thanks to them, they made my life so much easier in the early 2000s.

PuTTY is indeed wonderful, and may still have a future because of its particular TTY emulator. The Windows vt100 emulator built into the command console isn't awful, but still has some rough edges. PuTTY has been well sanded down.

And shout out also to SecureCRT which has been serving SSH client needs on Windows for even longer. Albeit commercial software, not open source.

The most prolific puzzle game maker and also the SSH savior!

It also has a terrible UI, considering it's a 19 year old product that seeminly never gets updated.

1) The IP input field is a text box; meaning I can type in 24324.3453.546.12321 and there's no mask.

2) Weird mess of modal and non-modal dialogs.

3) On a related note, if I open a shell window, close the main PUTTY window, but then the shell didn't manage to connect... it presents an error dialog and closes all the windows. How fucking annoying is that? You then have to open the start menu and run PUTTY again.

4) Copy/Paste is a total joke. Want to copy just a line of bit of text? No you get the whole 20 pages worth of scrollbuffer copied into it.

I really welcome this change. PUTTY had it's chance and they didn't even attempt to get a nice UI/UX.

Pretty sure the input field is made to support IP, Hostname or Domain name

No, the server does not run by default, as you'd assume from the title. Article just mentions, that the client is installed by default.

Actual title was editorialized.

Yes this is a misleading title. Please fix OP

Perhaps bizarrely I actually thought the title meant it disabled it, in the same way that "turning on" something/someone is taking a dislike to it.

Agree that the title is misleading.

Including the magic words 'dang' and 'please' can sometimes fix this.

The original title is way more accurate.

Windows 10 OpenSSH Client Installed by Default in April 2018 Update

Yeah, I thought it meant it was running an SSH server without the user's knowledge/consent.

It doesn't matter if an SSH server is running or not. This is just another avenue for people's systems to be compromised and for malicious actors to exfil data securely. Couple the SSH addition with Excel natively running JavaScript functions means Windows-based hosts are now more lucrative than ever.

For normal users, they have no use of a command-line SSH terminal, and they would likely not even know what such a function would be used for. Its just shitty decisions made by Microsoft with nearly no value added benefit.

This is good. I'm just not very enthusiastic about the Windows terminal.

I've used PuTTY for a very long time and it works great. Its terminal is good too.

More recently I've tended to use Cygwin instead. Its default terminal, MinTTY, is as close as you can get to a Linux terminal on Windows. And then Cygwin also offers the openssh client, of course.

The notable thing about the recent related news, IMO, is not that openssh-client is shipped with Windows. It's that openssh-server is now an option. A server properly integrated with Windows, and officially supported, that's a good thing to have.

MinTTY was originally based on PuTTY and while I may be a bit biased (having been sitting next to the developer in our day job in the period when he started developing it), I think it's actually a nicer terminal than pretty much any other I've met. If only for the feature wherein if you click on the last line in the terminal (including any wrapping) it'll work out how many characters are needed to move the cursor to that position and issue that many arrow-key presses.

Having never really used Windows, except from a brief inter job as a kid, it seems to be getting better and better, to the point were I'm beginning to consider it as a viable alternative.

Unix + Photoshop is what I need and MS seem to be coming from the other side by embracing Linux more and more.

I abandoned Windows 15 years ago; I switched over to Linux for about 7 years and then OS/X for 8 after that. I only returned to Windows this year, as it was required for a new job. Trust me: no, Windows is still as awful as it ever was.

for what sort of workload?

I'm primarily in text editors, IDEs, browsers and command line.

jetbrains stuff is cross-platform, and I'm assuming runs well on windows. the surfacebook world looks enticing, and my macbook is ... well, i'm getting enticed by the surface world. What sort of problems do you encounter?

I believe you, but I'm curious if you're using Windows 10? Also, what specifically is bad.

(I'm a Linux desktop user since '99, MacOS since 08)

It’s still a major PITA to install & maintain many open source tools, like curl, Ffmpeg, wget etc.

The tool chain is hit and miss.

Recompiling Ffmpeg with h265 support is one command on MacOS. I just recently had to recompile a R package that depended on some fairly obscure third party libraries. No problem, just a couple of brew install commands.

I’d hate to think how much manual work it would have taken to line up all the dependencies for that in Windows. Likely I’d have just given up.

It takes _ages_ to start up, for one thing. Debian, on the exact same hardware, starts up in seconds - Windows 7 takes minutes. You might argue that Windows is offering more functionality, but OS/X also starts orders of magnitude faster. There's no visibility on what the hell it's doing or how you can tune it. Wifi is hit-and-miss, and again, there's no way to peek into the internals and figure out what's going wrong. Configuration options are scattered everywhere; sometimes they're in control panel, sometimes they're in some random .msc file, sometimes they're just somewhere else for no reason. Linux is persnickety, but open - it takes some dedication to get things working, but you have the tools you need to do so. OS/X is closed, but "just works". Windows is persnickety, closed, and only sometimes works - you get the worst of Linux with the worst of OS/X and none of the good.

I think it depends on what you're doing. If you stay in the Linux subsystem, it is very similar to an actual Linux userland.

I find many of my struggles with Windows is the result of trying to solve a problem in the Windows subsystem in a "Unix-like" way instead of a "Windows-like" way.

I switched over from Windows to Linux about a year ago and the only thing I miss is some games that doesn't run on Linux. Things you would probably miss in Windows: The console, apt-get, open source software, config files, able to fix stuff, support/community, ZFS, support for new technology programming languages and frameworks. And stuff you will not like in Windows: Editing the registry, finding stuff in the GUI that switch places from time to time. Installing random programs from the web and give them Admin rights, paying for those programs, getting spy updates you did not ask for, your OS showing ads and tracking your every step and then calling home to send data about you, old programs doesn't work.

> getting spy updates you did not ask for, your OS showing ads and tracking your every step and then calling home to send data about you

Yeah, that’s a big reason holding me back.

And registry, drive letters, etc.

You can run Photoshop in Wine. Maybe it won't be the latest CC version, but it should get the job done.

As someone who jumped to Linux 5 years ago, I would never consider running Windows again. Paying for a license to get my data harvested regardless and see ads on my lock screen, no thanks. Instead I donate that money to a handful of Linux organizations, distros, and devs to support an ecosystem I love being a part of.

>Maybe it won't be the latest CC version, but it should get the job done.

I need the latest and I’d go crazy with some glitch or graphic acceleration missbehaviour due to Wine.

>Instead I donate that money to a handful of Linux organizations, distros, and devs to support an ecosystem I love being a part of.

That’s a nice atitude.

I've been meaning to enable this but I have a lot of hosts setup in ~/.ssh/config that is used by MINGW64's ssh (installed via Git for Windows). Does anyone know if Window's ssh client will pick up that config (or if having both ssh clients will cause issues)?

it will work if you add the ssh key to the ssh agent, I more or less copied my .ssh folder my WSL ubuntu install to my ~\.ssh folder and added my ssh key to the ssh agent :)

EDIT: How ever to get tab completion on what is in your config file you will need something like https://github.com/lukesampson/pshazz

Yup, you can either put it in %UserProfile%\.ssh\ssh_config or pass the -F <config_file> flag.

The Windows ssh client pulls its config and keys from %USERPROFILE%/.ssh/, as does the Git for Windows ssh-- they can and will share the same config as long as the config's valid for both (OpenSSH is the same release, but the Windows build uses LibreSSL instead of OpenSSL, so you could conceivably write a config file that isn't compatible with both, I think?).

It's about time. I was shocked when giving a "code along" presentation and found that none of my audience members with Windows 10 laptops could follow my presentation because the command prompt didn't have SSH. No SSH for crying out loud!

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