You have to create a god damn scheduled task to do Windows Updates over WinRM. And it takes ages for Powershell to realise the task is running, and polling the status of the job is a PITA.

Took me days to automate Windows 2012 with Packer. Ugh

For others facing a similar situation, I very strongly recommend starting here instead of DIY. :-)

https://github.com/joefitzgerald/packer-windows

> You have to create a god damn scheduled task to do Windows Updates over WinRM.

Aha. That must be why I could never get updates working with Packer/WinRM. It would take a very long time to do a huge amount of work then end up never quite finishing properly.

> And it takes ages for Powershell to realise the task is running, and polling the status of the job is a PITA.

OK, so not really a proper solution then. Oh well.

Hell yes. Watching packer shit a brick 5 times a day trying to upload virtualbox guest additions via WinRM makes me want this yesterday.

Also I had to up the memory ceiling on WinRM to 800Mb (WTF!) to even get it to complete.

It really is surprisingly bad, isn't it? I recently was involved in a continuous deployment system targeting Windows. We simply couldn't get WinRM to reliably upload fast and ended up installing SSH everywhere.

Having worked on that code (in Packer) - the WinRM protocol is completely unsuitable for use as an SCP replacement. It's amazing it works at all even for small files! The actual "winrmcp" implementation is here https://github.com/packer-community/winrmcp if you're interested in the inner workings.

OK, but that code (cp.go) uploads base64 chunks of 8K and echo's them to a file and decodes when done. That surely isn't the real WinRM file copy implementation right?

Well... I just went looking for how it's implemented and holy shit I don't think they considered this case. Top results say "use a file share". Wow. I feel less inadequate.

Yep that's horrible whatever the basis for it is.

Oh wow that's just horrible. I wish I hadn't looked now!

Yep definitely the worst thing ever. Not just that though; everything. I've lost so much hair in the last few months over trying to get a CD environment up on windows.

This. Everything about Windows and automation just feels like Bill & co really hates you personally, hates your company, and even the air you breath

... while also hating malaria.

I have a lot of respect for Bill Gates. If he could just pay for a replacement desk after I smashed it so hard out of Windows rage ... ;-)

I can't help but nod knowingly :)

I was so keen for WinRM support to land in Packer so I could avoid installing cygwin.

It was out of the frying pan and into the fire.

Native Windows SSH should _hopefully_ solve all this hassle.

This, so much. The current "endpoint bindings" are really aggravating to deal with, the slow speed... I can't wait! :-)