this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2023
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When you get it working it's just so cumbersome to use. I do most of my work on servers and doing anything with a Windows server is a pain in the ass. Want to restart something? Open an RDP session, wait for it to load, open the Services, wait for it to load, filter through thousands of services to find the one you want, fucking right-click on it and pick restart.
Compare this to Linux where you get a snappy SSH shell and restart it with one command.
And then there's the goddamn Windows Event Viewer. Can't have log files being, ya know, files right? No, gotta put them in this application on the server, that you have to view in the GUI, and show it alongside all the other logs so you have to filter by service. Most of the time I just export them to text files just because it's easier to process them on a sane OS.
This is more about your windows knowledge than windows. All the stuff you're mentioning can easily be done remotely with powershell remoting.
Also, I often just SSH to windows servers. Works fine, has been like that for years now.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/openssh/openssh_install_firstuse
I still have to log in via fucking RDP to set it up. Why do they even have a desktop environment on a goddamn server?
Also, Windows Event Viewer still blows
The default installation option for Windows Server is without a desktop environment.
Then why has every Windows admin I’ve ever had to deal with use the GUI?
Because that's how most people are taught.
You can use PowerShell to do more than the GUI can most of the time. Both locally and remotely.
It’s not most of them, it’s literally all of them. In the decade or so I’ve been doing enterprise software support I have never seen a Windows admin use SSH, nor met one who wasn’t flummoxed at the notion of a CLI, nor worked with any Windows server that didn’t have a GUI.
As one of those Windows admins who uses all of these things, I'd have to say it can't quite possibly be all of them...
I imagine if you’re able to figure out a CLI you can also read a log, do some googling, and figure things out on your own instead of calling me.
But there are depressingly few of you. So few that it took me until now to learn that Windows even has SSH.
Nah you don't. I've made plenty of headless installations for windows. You think everyone with a datacenter with hundreds of windows servers logs in to each of them with RDP? You can do it with an unattended.xml file. Which is harder to do than what I had to do to make a headless raspberry pi ubuntu server. By a lot, although if you look long enough, you might be able to copy someone else's unattended.xml.
Yeah, it's... an acquired taste. You can actually script it. But it is harder than string manipulation, since the events are all objects, not strings.
Cause I'm lazy.
All of the customers I've dealt with professionally who use Windows generally start with pre-configured VMware or similar images that they then deploy, and then configure with RDP. I have literally, in over 20 years of professional work, never seen a Windows sysadmin ever use SSH.
In fact, when they are forced to use a Linux server most of them will set up VNC to get into it rather than use SSH. WHY?????
Gotta love Windows: Files aren't files, dates aren't dates, logs aren't logs.
Which is strange to me because using a GUI is so much less efficient than a CLI. Which makes me think Windows' CLI is not nearly as good as even bash.
Also, if you're wondering these are the only complete instructions for setting up SSH login with key pairs without using RDP that I could find on the entire Internet.