Friday, June 22, 2007

KISS #4

This is really too easy.  Finding stupid and idiotic things about Vista is really just too easy.  This installment is not about any type of GUI but rather with the lack of secure inter-machine remoting capability.

Here at MySQL we have several Windows virtual machines setup to perform builds and tests of both our server code and our connectors.  Our builds are automated to be sure but our build engineers still need to "shell" into a remote box to perform some functions.  As any reasonable group would, we use ssh authentication for both our Linux and Windows boxes.  The problem, of course, is that no edition of Windows has shipped with a secure shell server or client.  Our build team is left with only a few alternatives and they have chosen to install cygwin on the Windows boxes.  Considering that cygwin has only recently become stable on 64 bit systems, this was shaky at best.

Now I realize that ssh networking is cutting edge technology <grin>, but Microsoft either doesn't realize that no one is using telnet anymore or they are delusional enough to think that no one really needs to shell to a remote command prompt.  Either way,  it's KISS #4.  Here's to you, Microsoft.  Keeping it simply stupid.

5 comments:

  1. &gt;Microsoft either doesn't realize that no one is using telnet anymore
    They do. As far as I know telnet was removed from Vista.

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  2. Telnet is shipped with Vista. It is just not installed by default.

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  3. PsExec (http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/utilities/psexec.mspx) always seems a good replacement to telnet/ssh to me...

    ok it could do with better encryption, but for something that works out of the box with no server-side changes it isn't bad...

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  4. Mike,

    Nice point on PsExec but it's not out of the box. My main point was that ssh like connectivity should just come with Vista.

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