TuxRunner

No, not Adam Deal… I learned from my Livonia teammates last week that the Unix team used to block off time on fridays sometimes to Drop Everything And Learn.  Well, since I have quite a lot to learn I’ve been dedicating a good portion of my monday and tuesdays as study time for Unix.  It’s been an excellent time to study though, it’s quiet out in the Rock Cottage lately.

I’ve been reading through a Bash scripting book for a few days now.  I already was familiar with quite a lot of what I’ve read so far, but what the book has been doing for me is filling in a lot of the finer details about bash that I’ve just never spent the time to read about.  It’s good though, I want to focus the same kind of intensity on this as I have in the past with VBScript and VMware ESX.

I’ve done it the other way around many times. Get a Linux box to act like a Windows box using software like Samba, Wine, etc. But now I’ve been tasked at work with a project which puts me in the position of having to get LPR/LPD printing and SSH/SFTP working on a Windows box. Unix printing is at least somewhat built-in to Windows 2003 Server. You need to install it though, it’s an add-on. Once installed Windows should start listening on TCP 515 and you should be able to share out printers as LPD printers. But getting a SSH server which can also do SFTP or SCP installed isn’t quite as easy (well, provided you don’t invest in a commercial package and want to do this free with open-source software). My first attempt with to install a copy of Cygwin and get OpenSSH running. Had some issues with that and it was a little more trouble than I wanted…so I found a slimmed down version of OpenSSH for Windows that contained just enough of Cygwin to make it work. I’ve managed to get it working fully and I can use it just like any Linux box with SSHD on it, but for some reason the vendor I’m working with can’t connect…although they’re using a mainframe based SSH/SFTP application. I have no troubles with any command-line or GUI apps I use to connect but this mainframe app is just not cooperating at all. I knew I should’ve thrown this at our Unix team to work on. Ahh, well. It’s all good clean fun. Blurring the lines between the OSes. Woohoo!