The discussion this morning turned towards remote administration of servers…  We’ve recently moved some services off of an old Linux box, and onto a Windows machine.  One of my co-workers built some very nice PowerShell scripts to enable us to continue working from the command-line…  So we don’t have to click a whole ton of buttons.

But we can’t SSH into that server anymore.

I figured it was probably just a role or a feature that had to be installed…  I know telnet has been available on Windows servers for years…  So SSH has to be available under 2008, right?  Especially with the addition of the CLI-only “core” servers…

Nope.

There are an assortment of 3rd-party utilities to enable SSH on a Windows Server 2008 machine…  But absolutely no native support for SSH.  Which I find downright inconceivable.

I can SSH in to any switch here on the network…  Any router…  Any firewall…  Any access point…  I can SSH in to any of our Macintosh laptops…  Any of our SANs…  I can even SSH in to the crappy consumer-grade Linksys router I’m running at home…

But I can’t SSH in to a Windows Server 2008 machine.

That seems like a huge oversight on Microsoft’s part…

Especially since telnet is still available under 2008.  I can’t imagine any sysadmin worth their salt actually using telnet these days.  I can’t imagine any sysadmin willingly throwing their credentials around in cleartext these days.  I would think moving to SSH would have been the logical progression…

But, apparently, I thought wrong.

Posted on February 16 at 8:39 AM