Back in June of this year Microsoft announced that they were working on a project to get sshd working proper on windows. Many, including myself didn’t believe it at the time, but then it surfaced again in October, this time for real, and I paid attention. I took the time this evening to give it a go, and it does work, and you too can get it up and running in no time flat. Here’s a quick how to:

Server Side

First on the machine you intend to be your SSH Server:

1. Download from the Win-OpenSSH package

2. Extract, and cd into the directory on the command line

3. In administrative powershell:

   ./ssh-keygen.exe -t rsa -f ssh_host_rsa_key ./sshd.exe install net start sshd

Down the road should you wish to uninstall:

net stop sshd
./sshd.exe uninstall

Client

For the client it is simply

./ssh.exe -l user@domain host

Then run the service you would like, such as powershell

Additional Commands

You might have to open up the firewall:

New-NetFirewallRule -Protocol TCP -LocalPort 22 -Direction Inbound -Action Allow -DisplayName SSH

And if you want to run the ssh server as a service, within powershell run:

Set-Service sshd -StartupType Automatic

References

For more information see the docs on github