This is probably my first article on Microsoft Windows. Some days back, I was asked to perform some tasks on Windows, though I'm not really a big fan of Windows, I managed to do it. Prior to the tasks, I wanted to have my usual SSH capabilities to log on the server, so I decided to install OpenSSH on the Windows 2012 R2 server. Microsoft has a repository for OpenSSH on Github. An interesting thing about Windows is that SSH has now been brought to Windows 2016. Well, I decided to add a new category on tunnelix.com about 'Windows'. Comment below if you find this weird!
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Please credit tunnelix.com for using the picture[/caption]
1. Point yourself into the directory where you want the file to be downloaded. In my case, it is the directory: C:\Users\Administrator\Desktop :
PS C:\Users\Administrator> cd C:\Users\Administrator\Desktop
2. The installation is pretty simple. You will need to download the .zip file from the Github repository using the Invoke-WebRequest command. By default, Invoke-WebRequest command supports TLS 1.1 and same has been deprecated. So you might need to change the security protocol to TLS1.2 or TLS1.3 using the following command:
PS C:\Users\Administrator\Desktop> [Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol = [Net.SecurityProtocolType]::Tls12
3. Then download the binary using the Invoke-WebRequest:
PS C:\Users\Administrator\Desktop> Invoke-WebRequest -Uri "https://github.com/PowerShell/Win32-OpenSSH/releases/download/v7.7.2.0p1-Beta/OpenSSH-Win64.zip" -OutFile "powershell.zip"
4. On a fresh installation, Windows 2012 R2 does not have the Expand-Archive command, so we will use .NET directly. Add-Type loads a .dll with the necessary .net functions in your current session. then [io.compression.zipfile] is a reference to that loaded .dll and ::ExtractToDirectory is the way to call a function from that dll :
PS C:\Users\Administrator\Desktop> Add-Type -assembly "system.io.compression.filesystem"
5. Now, we can unzip the file:
PS C:\Users\Administrator\Desktop> [io.compression.zipfile]::ExtractToDirectory( 'C:\Users\Administrator\Desktop\powershell.zip','C:\Users\Administrator\Desktop' )
6. After unzipping the file, get into the directory that has been unzipped and launch the installation:
PS C:\Users\Administrator\Desktop> cd .\OpenSSH-Win64
PS C:\Users\Administrator\Desktop\OpenSSH-Win64> .\install-sshd.ps1
7. The output should look as follows:
**** Warning: Publisher OpenSSH resources are not accessible.
[SC] SetServiceObjectSecurity SUCCESS
[SC] ChangeServiceConfig2 SUCCESS
[SC] ChangeServiceConfig2 SUCCESS
sshd and ssh-agent services successfully installed
8. The following command will show the status of the SSHD service:
PS C:\Users\Administrator\Desktop\OpenSSH-Win64> get-service | findstr ssh
Stopped ssh-agent OpenSSH Authentication Agent
Stopped sshd OpenSSH SSH Server
9. Launch the service with the following command:
PS C:\Users\Administrator> Start-Service sshd
10. You might need to add firewall rules to allow port 22 on the machine
PS C:\Users\Administrator> netsh advfirewall firewall add rule name=SSHPort dir=in action=allow protocol=TCP localport=22
11. You can also configure OpenSSH server to start automatically after the server reboot.
PS C:\Users\Administrator> Set-Service -Name sshd -StartupType "Automatic"
OpenSSH must be ready by now. You can SSH on your Windows server now. In future articles, I will blog more about Windows system administration, LDAP on Windows and more about Windows 2016 server. Enjoy :)