Well, that was a waste of time

Yeah.... So remember how I was messing with freeSSHd last weekend? I'm thinking that was a waste of time.

While the native shell thing in freeSSHd was cool, I had two big issues with it. First, the terminal was buggy. I got lots of weird screen artifacts when I connected to it - the screen not clearing properly, weird random characters hanging around after a lot of output, etc. Not the rock-solid terminal experience I'm used to.

The second thing was something that occurred to me after trying out a couple of SSH sessions. If freeSSHd is using a native shell, with native file paths, how is that going to work with SCP and SFTP? How does it account for drive letters and path delimiters? Turns out the answer (at least for SFTP) was restricting access to a certain pre-defined directory ($HOME by default). For SCP...well, I still haven't figured out how that's supposed to work. But either way, this is decidedly not the behavior I was looking for.

So instead, I decided to go the old-fashioned way and just install Cygwin and use their OpenSSH server. And you know what? It was completely painless. I just used this handy LifeHacker entry to get the auto-config command and the necessary settings, and I was done. I started the service, connected to the SSH server, and all my stuff was right where it was supposed to be. I have a solid, familiar terminal, access to my whole system via SCP and SFTP, and NT authentication worked out of the box. Heck, the hardest part was figuring out the funky non-standard UI of the installer's package selection dialog. I should have just used Cygwin from the beginning and saved myself some effort.

You can reply to this entry by leaving a comment below. This entry accepts Pingbacks from other blogs. You can follow comments on this entry by subscribing to the RSS feed.

Related entries

Add your comments #

A comment body is required. No HTML code allowed. URLs starting with http:// or ftp:// will be automatically converted to hyperlinks.