Remote Control
I’ve been looking at Capistrano lately. Capistrano is most certainly opinionated software; it makes a number of assumptions about your environment. The Absolute Moron’s Guide to Capistrano has a very nice overview.
The problem with Capistrano, from my point of view, is that I need to deploy to Windows machines, and Capistrano relies on SSH, which is something that “just works” on Windows. Fortunately, this HOWTO bridges the gap between “huh?” and “just works”.
It occurs to me that if you wanted to distill the difference between the “Windows mentality” and the “Unix mentality”, SSH is a great place to start. Powershell 2.0 is supposed to have some sort of remote command facility, but at this point, you really need to bring up an RDP session and terminal services and all that if you want to execute commands on a remote server. It seems like an obvious thing to want to do. Why does Windows Server 2003 ship with Media Player, an application that’s totally useless on a production server, but not sshd?
Oh, and the snapshot feature VMWare has? Pure brilliance. That’s saved my bacon so many times in the past week. That’s one that should go on the Start menu.
— Gordon Weakliem
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