[tortech] Managing Multiple Windows Servers

[Blake Crosby]

Hello,

Does anyone know of any tools to manage multiple windows servers?

For example, have an interface to start/stop services on all machines...
or push config files to all the windows servers?

Blake

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Thu, Dec 08, 2005 at 10:28:14AM -0500, Blake Crosby wrote:
| Does anyone know of any tools to manage multiple windows servers?
|
| For example, have an interface to start/stop services on all machines...
| or push config files to all the windows servers?

Well I imagine running ssh server on them (like cygwin can provide) and
then using ssh to connect and run 'net start service' or 'net stop
service' would work. Registry changes can be made by greating a .reg file
and merging that (which I am sure can also be done from a command line).
Not sure windows really has 'config files' any more.

Personally I just avoid windows servers.

Len Sorensen

[Reid Ellis]

On Thu, Dec 08, 2005 at 10:28:14AM -0500, Blake Crosby wrote:
| Does anyone know of any tools to manage multiple windows servers?
|
| For example, have an interface to start/stop services on all
| machines... or push config files to all the windows servers?

On Dec 8, 2005, at 7:56 AM, Lennart Sorensen answered:
| Well I imagine running ssh server on them (like cygwin can provide)
| and then using ssh to connect and run 'net start service' or 'net
| stop service' would work. Registry changes can be made by greating
| a .reg file and merging that (which I am sure can also be done from
| a command line). Not sure windows really has 'config files' any more.
|
| Personally I just avoid windows servers.
|
| Len Sorensen

Hm, this brings up something I was wondering about recently -- is
there a (preferably free) cygwin-less ssh server for windows? i.e.
one that just plops you at a command shell prompt?

I've been thrown into Windows-land just to update a web server with a
new version of a site. I ftp (note, sftp would be nice too) a zip to
the server, and then use a Java VNC applet to graphically select the
old folder, delete it and replace it with an unzipped new version.
This seems to me to be a collosal waste of bandwidth for something
that could easily be done on the command line. It would probably push
me into learning more about BAT syntax than I really wanted to know,
but hey.

For more fun, I've recently installed Ruby on Rails on the server, to
see if I can move the site over to that. It would be so much nicer
than the evil VBScript Hell I've been thrown into, I'll tell you.

Reid

[Julian C. Dunn]

On Thu, 8 Dec 2005, Reid Ellis wrote:

| Hm, this brings up something I was wondering about recently -- is
| there a (preferably free) cygwin-less ssh server for windows? i.e.
| one that just plops you at a command shell prompt?

OpenSSH for Windows will do that:

http://sshwindows.sourceforge.net/

It's fairly old, though (>1 year) and I'm not certain that anyone's still
maintaining it.

- Julian

[Mario J. Reis]

One of my friends who is an admin for BMO says....

"Active Directory Groups policies can push out files to Groups of servers,
You can also control what services are run on groups of machines.

On the fly, you could use PSTools from winternals.com which can do a lot of
the remote tasks like killing processes and services, etc."

Hope this helps...


-marior

-----Original Message-----
From: tortech-***@lists.samurai.com
[mailto:tortech-***@lists.samurai.com] On Behalf Of Julian C. Dunn
Sent: Thursday, December 08, 2005 3:02 PM
To: ***@samurai.com
Subject: Re: [tortech] Managing Multiple Windows Servers

On Thu, 8 Dec 2005, Reid Ellis wrote:

| Hm, this brings up something I was wondering about recently -- is
| there a (preferably free) cygwin-less ssh server for windows? i.e.
| one that just plops you at a command shell prompt?

OpenSSH for Windows will do that:

http://sshwindows.sourceforge.net/

It's fairly old, though (>1 year) and I'm not certain that anyone's still
maintaining it.

- Julian