Back then they didn’t really understand the point of ssh though. They had a vision of remote management via .net RPC and powershell.

SSH is an awesome tool & capability as a relatively high level network channel. The defacto “shell” approach leads to a lot of problems when used as a management device. It encourages adhoc, unstructured, and opaque changes. Managing your hosts via Secure Shell simply leads to bespoke, unrepeatable, outcomes and crushing debt.

Moving to a well structered, repeatable, management paradigm is the only way to survive large or long term deployments. I see “systems configuration” and “orchestration” as the most common ways to achieve that. Personally Ive been trying to move linux/bsd host management off of SSH for 10 years now. I will be very very happy when SSH shell instantiations approach zero per day.

SSH is not for management. SSH is for remote access. What people do with their remote access is not SSH's concern. Ad-hoc management is just as possible and easy via RSAT and PowerShell. Hell, I've seen management via ansible devolve into a mess of unmaintainable, unrepeatable script heap.

> Moving to a well structered, repeatable, management paradigm is the only way to survive large or long term deployments.

And how would such a paradigm remotely access the machines? The tool I use uses SSH for:

1. Running commands on remote machines, interactively & non-interactively;

2. Synchronising files on remote machines, via SFTP and Rsync;

3. Forwarding network ports to provide secure access to remote services, e.g. Redis.

Personally, I've been trying to move app deployment and debugging onto SSH in every team I've worked with, and I will be very happy when developers are able to treat a remote machine (development or production) as little more than just a well-managed local machine.

To answer your questions you probably have a dedicated on host agent. See MCollective or AWS SSM for examples Im familiar with. It doesnt really matter that the transport or message model is. Its more important that your actions are discrete, well modeled, with defined & structured inputs and outputs. Its also inportant that theres an intermediary so you can get the scope of control away relying on client and end hosts.

For #1 interactive is almost orthoganal. For #1 & #2 Its that you have structure, repeatability, validation, auditing, testability, etc. #3 again a transport problem, or similar.

For your last point my issue is if you treat dev and prod as similar change and access problems. The environment can certainly look or feel the same. But the output of dev should be discrete managed artifacts. If you need to do adhoc exploratory stuff on prod thats a good sign you lack control or valid synoptic model of your systems.

That said, we may be trying to solve different problems. I have lots of teams, more ICs, and many hosts. Getting from artifice to industry is important at some point.

Edit: go check out the mcollective demos to get an idea of how you can change the access/use model.

Sometimes you just have to give people the candy they want - even if its not good for them.

Isn't this an anti-pattern considering the cloud tenants of treating machines as cattle not pets?

SSH and Remote Desktop solve a different problem. It may not be the one you have - but some of us just need to log into the machine because we have needs that don’t fit into some predefined workflow. Or we have so few boxes it’s not worth it.

Consider SSHing into a large build machine for compiling as an example.

For Ansible users, Windows getting OpenSSH is a huge win, since we (presumably) will no longer have to jump through all the hoops WinRM throws you in order to configure Windows machines remotely.

SSH was originally intended to replace the aging unencrypted protocols that were used for remote access (telnet, rsh etc). It comes from a time when configuration management tools like ansible, puppet et all didn't exist, and most system management was ad-hoc, or done by home grown scripting. So it makes a sense that it behaves the same way as rsh for the most part.

WinRM (which this Microsoft implementation of OpenSSH will replace for most Ansible/UNIX users that are managing Windows systems) also allowed arbitrary command execution as well, so it was really no better.

As an outside observer, it really looked to me like Microsoft had their head in the clouds up until about 2011. It's like the whole decade between 2005-2015 for MS was about recognizing and coming to terms with the multiple "whole worlds out there" and getting past NIH syndrome.

The one place this didn’t apply was your choice of code editor. You could use whatever you wanted and that had long been tradition. I spent a lot of effort getting VIM to work only to realize it didn’t scale well to multi-million LOC code bases.

Really had nothing to do with the size of the file.

An organisation large enough would have middle management and people who promote from within. And they are successful in one culture and it worked even for customers.

Then ...

Passing serialised scriptblocks to the remote host, executing them, and getting serialized objects back. Meaning you can pass serialisable objects around, handle errors, the multiple output streams, etc. over the remoting connection.

Because it's integrated into the language, you can pull PowerShell modules over from the remote host to the local host automatically generating proxy stubs for them ("implicit remoting"). E.g. to manage and Exchange server you can remote to it, and bring the Exchange cmdlets back, and then import them locally as if they were a local module.

It's also able to do that and edit the proxies as it builds them for you, to allow and restrict what commands you get - based on your permissions and perhaps which tier of service you're paying for. And not just allow or restrict commands, but allow or restrict individual parameters on those commands, if desired.

That's fine in theory, except that some very common Windows Objects can't be serialized in any meaningful way (most painful one for me being the Windows Update Client), which means that certain "remote" operations are actually affecting the client machine, or are failing because the client lacks support for certain operations.

I've been using Powershell since v2, but to me, it's essentially a walled garden automation environment. Just one more way for Microsoft not to give you the tools to efficiently manage your fleet.

a) I think the normal use is something like SCCM or InTune to automate Windows Updates, not manually connecting to a machine and trying to script the Windows Update Client.

b) Microsoft built Azure Stack with PowerShell automation. Are you saying Microsoft refused to give themselves the tools to efficiently manage their own fleet? What tools even are these?

That’s why I can guarantee Remote Desktop has more usage than these remote rpc calls for ad-hoc work. Powershell is quite powerful but it’s features are more for programmers than users.

Because of its complexity RPC is not a replacement for ssh where you are typing commands directly to the remote machine.

This is partly why nobody developed proper open source Exchange clients: the Exchange protocol is MAPI over DCE/RPC, and you need to build a lot of infrastructure before it will even talk to you.

Samba still does amazing stuff on the directory RPC front.

A customer of mine fires up servers to run tasks on them. A few of those tasks are programs that unfortunately run only on Windows (the pain of updating those boxes!) I install ssh to be able to perform some basic operations on them and move files over sftp. Hopefully an integrated ssh server works better (issues with terminal, etc.)

I understand that this is not a scenario Microsoft would advocate in the past, but eventually Microsoft lost the war for servers so it's giving us interoperability tools now.

If you told me I had to do anything advanced with Windows using only a CLI, I wouldn’t know where to start. On the other hand, I could maneuver my way around a bash shell. I haven’t thought about that before now.....

cmd.exe and DOS were both text-oriented but extremely buggy and inconsistent. Perhaps MS could just focus on providing a very bash-like language (perhaps even include gnu utilities) while supporting the major interactive use cases for cmd.

I'm not great with it yet, but it feels intuitively like a step forward to be able to pass objects around instead of spending so much of my time using awk-ward 40 year old tools to tease text out of various fields.

But terminals and the tooling around them have always revolved around text. My point is that since Microsoft is (a) including OpenSSH, (b) upgrading their terminal infrastructure to support VT100 and ANSI codes, and (c) investing in WSL, it would make make a lot of sense to add a Windows-native shell that is more text-oriented. Not because I hate working with objects and APIs, but because plain text ought to be the primary, first-class supported data format when working on a terminal.

PowerShell is great, but it's an object-oriented (not text-oriented) shell.

That's because they're from the 70s, when literal terminals with no real computing power were connected to a centralized system that did all the work. They're archaic and silly.

They may seem that way to some, but they still provide a surprisingly versatile and useful user interface. Terminal programs and scripts are easy and fast to write, easy to interact with, easy to change, and trivially portable across POSIX platforms; hence, when writing a tool for oneself or another developer, most developers will usually opt for a CLI-based UI. Terminal program UIs are also very stable (in addition to being text-based), making them arbitrarily composable into scripts and workflows without fear of them breaking in the future.

Modern graphical UIs are usually easy to use, but they are far-removed from the code and tools that are used to write them or interact with their APIs programmatically. Terminal program UIs, however, are very close to the environment they're built in -- so the line between using a terminal program and interacting with it programmatically is delightfully blurred.

I use a multi-paned iTerm2/zsh window every day as a front-end developer (I'm on a Mac running macOS Mojave). I can't imagine working without it. There are a lot of good reasons npm, git, and other popular mainstays in modern development workflows are terminal-based.

They are doing exactly that: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/commandline/2018/08/02/wind...

If I were a server admin, I’d probably turn all of that off because it’s more attack surface area. And cripple myself in the process. For that reason alone, I think a new shell is probably more likely to be helpful.

Personally, the Windows Admin Center is a nice-to-have tool for quick tasks by inexperienced or occasional admins - but you really should just learn Powershell.