I need to be able to monitor a couple of directories on a clients PC in order to integrate their Business Post label printing system with the orders database that I am writing for them. I was struggling to find something that would work well for Windows. As a Linux based business we would like to use some of the tools we know about, and the perfect one had the target computer been running linux instead of windows, would have been ssh. The benefits of which being I can script commands to be run and don’t need a GUI (Graphical User Interface) so I can automate.

Well, thanks to the folks over at cygwin I could use ssh in a unix like environment on windows. This was a fantastic piece of news for me as I can also use cron to create system events. The scripting environments mean that I am well set to create any software needed for testing the connection and keeping the connection secure.

So, how do you do it? Well, download setup.exe from the cygwin site and run it. Make sure that “ssh” is selected from “net” section of the packages.

Once installed, open the shell and run “ssh-host-config”. Ensure that the routing is OK to your machine, by opening ports or enabling some port-forwarding if behind a router/gateway.

Log in from a foreign machine. Ssh will use the users and their password for the login information. Sshd (the server daemon process) will load as a service whenever you are in windows.