RSH console

Hi,

Doesn't Windows VISTA has rsh or ssh anymore?
I urgently need a solution/workaround to this problem preferably without 3rd
party software.

"Ifstat" <> wrote ...
> Doesn't Windows VISTA has rsh or ssh anymore?
> I urgently need a solution/workaround to this problem preferably without
> 3rd
> party software.


Hi,

Do you need rsh or rshd? (ie: server, or client? or both?).

The Rshd server has never been a standard component of Windows. The was a
rsh service in the Windows 2000 Resource Kit tools. This might or might not
run on Vista, but it would be untested and unsupported. It wouldn't be a
good a solution.

All the "r" utilities (rexec, rsh, finger) etc have been dropped from Vista
and Windows Server 2008. I don't know the exact reason but I suspect they
were just too insecure to meet the Vista/Longhorn security guidelines. They
all pass passwords in the clear. In any case, most customers use SSH etc in
real life, so no-one was expected to miss them. So, there's no rsh in Vista.

Unfortunately, there is no built-in SSH, either. This has been a very
frequently requested feature. I believe there are complex legal issues
around intellectual property (sic) which prevent Microsoft from delivering
any SSH "in the box". No Windows has a built-in SSH and won't have, for the
foreseeable future - SSH will always be a 3rd party solution.

There are a few solutions. If you really, *really* must have a 100%
Microsoft-supplied solution, there is both rsh and rshd in the Subsystem for
Unix Applications feature in Vista. This is available in Enterprise and
Ultimate editions of Vista. SUA gives you a fairly complete POSIX subsystem,
with Korn shell, grep, sed, awk etc. rsh and rshd are both installed by
default as part of SUA - note that they only run in the POSIX subsystem, so
there is limited interprocess communication with any Win32 applications. You
can share data between SUA and Win32 apps, but it isn't seamless.

The other possibility would be to download and install OpenSSH for the
Services for Unix Subsystem, from Interop Systems (www.interopsystems.com).
These guys are basically the original crew who wrote SUA, back when it was
the "Interix" product. They have set up their own company and port open
source applications to run on SUA on XP, Windows Server 203, Vista and
Server 2008. OpenSSH is - well, the normal OpenSSH package, same as you'd
install on Linux or Unix. Once again it runs as a POSIX SUA application, it
isn't a Win32 app.

There are of course many Win32 implementations of SSH for Windows. Possibly
the most popular is Putty:
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/
Putty is very widely used and is high quality, very reliable. It is also
free. There is also a commercial implementation of SSH for Windows, from SSH
Inc themselves - for some inexplicable reason, they renamed the product to
"Tectia" but it is the normal SSH, as produced by SSH Oy in Finland.

Of course if you are working in a pure Win32/Windows environment, the
"canonical" solution to remote command shells, would be Remote Desktop -
which is also built-in.

Hope this helps,
--
Andrew McLaren
amclar (at) optusnet dot com dot au