Interix/SUA SSH server any good?
There are a lot of homebrew SSH servers (some free, some paid) out there, but I’ve always stuck to Cygwin’s port of OpenSSH because:
Despite all of its strange properties, I am familiar with Cygwin, and more likely to know how to debug it when things go wrong, and
It gives me only a slightly braindead shell (i.e. not cmd.exe) to work in.
This was the state of affairs several years ago, when I quit using Windows for Linux. Well, I’m back now, and some things have changed:
Cygwin is still braindead. In a variety of colorful ways.
MinGW’s msys utilities are feature complete enough to give a reasonable environment for a developer interested in doing native Windows development in a Unixy skin. However, it still doesn’t come with an SSH server.
Microsoft has included Interix (also known as Subsystem for Unix-based Applications) in recent versions of Windows.
I've been using MinGW to do most of my native Windows development these days, and I am quite happy to report that it is here to stay. However, the lack of an SSH server had been killing me, and most of the other options seemed insufficiently compelling for me to stop using Cygwin’s OpenSSH (which also happens to give me a ton of other useful packages which will do the Right Thing™ as long as I’m not compiling C.)
But SUA is possibly the thing that will let me ditch Cygwin forever! In particular, the SUA community appears to have a version of OpenSSH server. So my question, does it actually work, and is it sufficiently on track to become the de facto SSH implementation (much like Remote Desktop Services became the de facto remoting application for enterprise Windows) that it is worth switching to?
Solution 1:
My university uses OpenSSH for SUA to get SFTP access on windows server 2008 systems. The thing you will have to worry about is SUA is UNIX not linux (logs are in different places - for example) and also tools created to protect against SSH brute force attacks such as Denyhosts and fail2ban simply don't exist to my knowledge. Overall I would definately recommend installing and looking at it but keep the security issue in mind.