Cygwin: Salvation on Windows
Cygwin as-distributed provides a rather unique, and sometimes inconvenient, mechanism for installation. A small network-install executable is provided, which consults online repositories for downloads of installation artifacts. The install executable also relies on locally-written meta-data to keep track of the entire installation footprint.
cygrunsrv -L
inetd
service won't show in the list, even if installed/running, but stopping it and removing it will work regardless cygrunsrv –stop service_name
cygrunsrv –remove service_name
cyglsa
authentication mechanisms (hopefully not - pain), revert all of thatcygwin
(or cygwin64
) folder treePATH
)regedit
program, remove the registry tree(s) Software\Cygwin
under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
and/or HKEY_CURRENT_USER
Cygwin makes a particularly powerful solution for a client-side agent in providing central command-n-control with a centralized backup/archival system. Here are some details around how Albert Lea Data has devised such a solution.
$USR
) for the backup system identity to be used, log into Windows as that usercygwin64
folder extracted from the ZIP archive to suitable destination, we'll refer to as $CYGDIR
(either c:\
or d:\
recommended) .reg
files extracted from the ZIP archive to ensure path references are corrected.reg
file and choose Merge
Cygwin.bat
batch file in the $CYGDIR
folder and choose Run as administrator
mkpasswd -l > /etc/passwd mkgroup -l > /etc/group chmod 111 /var chmod +t /var ssh-host-config
Make sure to enter ntsec
for CYGWIN value, and specify your new admin user when prompted
cygsrvrun -S sshd
ssh-keygen -t rsa
… make sure to specify empty passphrase authorized_keys
file with server's SSH key for password-less operationyes
at key prompt) chmod g-w ~
This is the recipe for how the client-side agent footprint is bundled, and how to go about upgrading it.