Re: Updating cygwin from a remote shell?

Re: Updating cygwin from a remote shell?

[G.W. Haywood]

Hi there,

On Tue, 8 Jul 2008 Andrew DeFaria wrote:

> Thomas Walker wrote:
>
> > ... I did a decent amount of looking through mailing lists but
> > couldn't find anything relevant.

Been there too. :)

> > ... want to be able to add new features ... and would like to be
> > able to easily update cygwin and/or install new packages onto the
> > Windows/Cygwin boxes from a remote shell.

Ditto.

> > I know I can setup VNC and all that fun stuff and run setup.exe but is
> > there an easier way? The usual yum, apt, up2date, etc. don't seem to
> > be options...
>
> There is no yum, apt, up2date, etc. You don't need VNC. RDP is already
> on XP machines. Use rdesktop(1).

I've been struggling with these same issues for some years.  I manage
a network for a business which is located a few hundred metres away
from mine, and we use a radio link for the connection between us which
means there are no connectivity problems.  Even so, however, if I use
rdesktop to connect to their Windows 2000 server and I'm not _very_
careful how I close down the rdesktop session then the server crashes.
This is really inconvenient because the server does relatively mundane
things like recording production information and the times when people
clock on and off as they arrive for work and leave.  Sometimes they
take it personally...  Of course I've suggested upgrading to a later
OS but that's a very expensive exercise.  So I use ssh for everything
that I can do with ssh, and avoid logging in with rdesktop except in
dire emergency.  If there's something that I can't do with ssh then I
schedule the work to be done on site when I can physically go there
and not be in the way too much.  That sucks, especially as they plan
to move the server to another site two miles away in a few months.

If there are any tips for a safer way of connecting to a Windows 2000
server to do routine upgrades of Cygwin and other remote admin that I
can't do using ssh, I'd be very happy to hear them.

--

73,
Ged.

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Re: Updating cygwin from a remote shell?

[Brian Dessent]

"G.W. Haywood" wrote:

> If there are any tips for a safer way of connecting to a Windows 2000
> server to do routine upgrades of Cygwin and other remote admin that I
> can't do using ssh, I'd be very happy to hear them.

If a reboot is allowable then you can use a tool like inuse.exe from the
MS Resource Kit to schedule the files for replacement on the next boot. 
You could do a poor man's version of this that doesn't require a reboot
by writing a batch file to move/copy the inuse files and running it via
the built-in at.exe scheduler for 5 minutes in the future or whatever. 
The batch file would have to take care to stop all cygwin services, do
the file operations, and then restart them.  This of course would be
rather brittle as missing some part of the upgrade would mean the
services might not start again so you'd need a safety net like a vnc
daemon running.

Brian

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Re: Updating cygwin from a remote shell?

[Andrew DeFaria]

G.W. Haywood wrote:
>> There is no yum, apt, up2date, etc. You don't need VNC. RDP is 
>> already on XP machines. Use rdesktop(1).
> I've been struggling with these same issues for some years. I manage a 
> network for a business which is located a few hundred metres away from 
> mine, and we use a radio link for the connection between us which 
> means there are no connectivity problems. Even so, however, if I use 
> rdesktop to connect to their Windows 2000 server and I'm not _very_ 
> careful how I close down the rdesktop session then the server crashes.
I've never seen this happen at all. By definition, any user application 
able to crash a system is a bug. You got a bug there. It should be fixed.
> If there are any tips for a safer way of connecting to a Windows 2000 
> server to do routine upgrades of Cygwin and other remote admin that I 
> can't do using ssh, I'd be very happy to hear them.
You could try VNC. In my experience RDP is nicer and much faster then 
VNC. VNC, however, works on non servers and non XP machines where RDP is 
not an option. If VNC likewise caused the server to crash I'd be 
surprised. Then again, rdesktop crashing a server is odd. Is it actually 
dumping core?
-- 
Andrew DeFaria <http://defaria.com>
If a cow laughed, would milk come out her nose?


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Re: Updating cygwin from a remote shell?

[G.W. Haywood]

Hi there,

Thanks, all, for the responses.

On Wed, 9 Jul 2008 Andrew DeFaria wrote:

> > rdesktop to connect to their Windows 2000 server and I'm not _very_
> > careful how I close down the rdesktop session then the server crashes.
>
> I've never seen this happen at all. By definition, any user application
> able to crash a system is a bug. You got a bug there. It should be fixed.

Agreed. :)

> > If there are any tips for a safer way of connecting to a Windows 2000
> > server to do routine upgrades of Cygwin and other remote admin that I
> > can't do using ssh, I'd be very happy to hear them.
>
> You could try VNC.

Thanks, I'll give it a try

> [...] RDP is nicer and much faster then VNC. VNC, however, works [...]

I'll be happy if it just does that. :)

> Then again, rdesktop crashing a server is odd. Is it actually
> dumping core?

Yes.  But I don't want to hijack this thread by going on to debug that
particular problem. :)  Actually I'm not sure that it's rdesktop itself
that's causing the crash.  It will crash if I do other things remotely
using rdesktop, such as paging rapidly through the system log using the
log viewer from 'administrative tools'.  It isn't something that I can
easily investigate, largely because I'd be lynched by an angry mob from
the welding shop.  FWIW I've never caused a crash using Cygwin+ssh, and
that's how I try to do most of what I need to do.

--

73,
Ged.

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Updating cygwin from a remote shell?

[Thomas Walker]

Apologies if this is a newbie question... I did a decent amount of
looking through mailing lists but couldn't find anything relevant.

I'm a Linux/Unix person by hobby and profession and don't really do
much Windows but my family (living in another state) is still rather
Windows centric.  A hard disk failure ago I decided to place a dirt
cheap headless Linux box with mirrored raid on their network and setup
cygwin on their Windows machines so that I could cobble together an
easy backup solution based on cron, ssh, rdist, and fuse.

That all works fine and has done so for some time.  I'm a little bit
of a security nut though (and sometime also want to be able to add new
features for myself and for them) and would like to be able to easily
update cygwin and/or install new packages onto the Windows/Cygwin
boxes from a remote shell.

I know I can setup VNC and all that fun stuff and run setup.exe but is
there an easier way?  The usual yum, apt, up2date, etc. don't seem to
be options...


Thanks.

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Re: Updating cygwin from a remote shell?

[Andrew DeFaria]

Thomas Walker wrote:
> Apologies if this is a newbie question... I did a decent amount of 
> looking through mailing lists but couldn't find anything relevant.
>
> I'm a Linux/Unix person by hobby and profession and don't really do 
> much Windows but my family (living in another state) is still rather 
> Windows centric. A hard disk failure ago I decided to place a dirt
> cheap headless Linux box with mirrored raid on their network and setup 
> cygwin on their Windows machines so that I could cobble together an 
> easy backup solution based on cron, ssh, rdist, and fuse.
>
> That all works fine and has done so for some time. I'm a little bit of 
> a security nut though (and sometime also want to be able to add new 
> features for myself and for them) and would like to be able to easily
> update cygwin and/or install new packages onto the Windows/Cygwin 
> boxes from a remote shell.
>
> I know I can setup VNC and all that fun stuff and run setup.exe but is 
> there an easier way? The usual yum, apt, up2date, etc. don't seem to 
> be options...
There is no yum, apt, up2date, etc. You don't need VNC. RDP is already 
on XP machines. Use rdesktop(1).
-- 
Andrew DeFaria <http://defaria.com>
If I want your opinion, I'll ask you to fill out the necessary forms.


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Re: Updating cygwin from a remote shell?

[Larry Hall (Cygwin)]

Thomas Walker wrote:
> Apologies if this is a newbie question... I did a decent amount of
> looking through mailing lists but couldn't find anything relevant.
> 
> I'm a Linux/Unix person by hobby and profession and don't really do
> much Windows but my family (living in another state) is still rather
> Windows centric.  A hard disk failure ago I decided to place a dirt
> cheap headless Linux box with mirrored raid on their network and setup
> cygwin on their Windows machines so that I could cobble together an
> easy backup solution based on cron, ssh, rdist, and fuse.
> 
> That all works fine and has done so for some time.  I'm a little bit
> of a security nut though (and sometime also want to be able to add new
> features for myself and for them) and would like to be able to easily
> update cygwin and/or install new packages onto the Windows/Cygwin
> boxes from a remote shell.
> 
> I know I can setup VNC and all that fun stuff and run setup.exe but is
> there an easier way?  The usual yum, apt, up2date, etc. don't seem to
> be options...

In order to install Cygwin without a reboot (and a message asking you to
close running Cygwin processes), you need a remote shell not based on
Cygwin.  That said (or perhaps notwithstanding), did you see?

<http://cygwin.com/faq/faq-nochunks.html#faq.setup.cli>


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Holliston, MA 01746

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Re: Updating cygwin from a remote shell?

[cuicui]

Thomas Walker a écrit :
> Apologies if this is a newbie question... I did a decent amount of
> looking through mailing lists but couldn't find anything relevant.
> 
> I'm a Linux/Unix person by hobby and profession and don't really do
> much Windows but my family (living in another state) is still rather
> Windows centric.  A hard disk failure ago I decided to place a dirt
> cheap headless Linux box with mirrored raid on their network and setup
> cygwin on their Windows machines so that I could cobble together an
> easy backup solution based on cron, ssh, rdist, and fuse.
> 
> That all works fine and has done so for some time.  I'm a little bit
> of a security nut though (and sometime also want to be able to add new
> features for myself and for them) and would like to be able to easily
> update cygwin and/or install new packages onto the Windows/Cygwin
> boxes from a remote shell.
> 
> I know I can setup VNC and all that fun stuff and run setup.exe but is
> there an easier way?  The usual yum, apt, up2date, etc. don't seem to
> be options...

I think that dpkg exists but you cannot update binaries that are 
running. If you are connected with ssh, the setup process will stop if 
it has to update bash, openssh, cygrunsrv and cygwin...

Cheers,


Nicolas

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Re: Updating cygwin from a remote shell?

[Nathan Thern]

On Tue, Jul 8, 2008 at 4:58 AM, Thomas Walker <thwalker3@gmail.com> wrote:
> Apologies if this is a newbie question... I did a decent amount of
> looking through mailing lists but couldn't find anything relevant.
>
> I'm a Linux/Unix person by hobby and profession and don't really do
> much Windows but my family (living in another state) is still rather
> Windows centric.  A hard disk failure ago I decided to place a dirt
> cheap headless Linux box with mirrored raid on their network and setup
> cygwin on their Windows machines so that I could cobble together an
> easy backup solution based on cron, ssh, rdist, and fuse.
>
> That all works fine and has done so for some time.  I'm a little bit
> of a security nut though (and sometime also want to be able to add new
> features for myself and for them) and would like to be able to easily
> update cygwin and/or install new packages onto the Windows/Cygwin
> boxes from a remote shell.

From your remote shell run
$ cygstart /setup.exe -q -n -s http://valid-cygwin-mirror

I assume no one is using the machine who will be freaked out by the
setup app appearing on their screen.

You only have a problem in two cases:
1) The update will clobber an executable you are using (e.g. bash or sshd)
solution: somehow schedule the update & exit out. You may also have to
schedule a shutdown & later re-start of cygserver.

2) You want to add new packages
Here's the route I would pursue: Create your own cygwin repository
(say, http://foosite/cygwin) with a uniquely named empty package (say,
"foo") in the "base" category. Make foo require all the packages you
want, and make sure all the remote machines have foo installed.

Any time you update foo, from the remotely logged in CL run
$ cygstart /setup.exe -q -n -s http://valid-cygwin-mirror -s
http://foosite/cygwin

regards,
NT

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Re: Updating cygwin from a remote shell?

[Nathan Thern]

On Tue, Jul 8, 2008 at 4:58 AM, Thomas Walker <thwalker3@gmail.com> wrote:
> Apologies if this is a newbie question... I did a decent amount of
> looking through mailing lists but couldn't find anything relevant.
>
> I'm a Linux/Unix person by hobby and profession and don't really do
> much Windows but my family (living in another state) is still rather
> Windows centric.  A hard disk failure ago I decided to place a dirt
> cheap headless Linux box with mirrored raid on their network and setup
> cygwin on their Windows machines so that I could cobble together an
> easy backup solution based on cron, ssh, rdist, and fuse.
>
> That all works fine and has done so for some time.  I'm a little bit
> of a security nut though (and sometime also want to be able to add new
> features for myself and for them) and would like to be able to easily
> update cygwin and/or install new packages onto the Windows/Cygwin
> boxes from a remote shell.

From your remote shell run
$ cygstart /setup.exe -q -n -s http://valid-cygwin-mirror

I assume no one is using the machine who will be freaked out by the
setup app appearing on their screen.

You only have a problem in two cases:
1) The update will clobber an executable you are using (e.g. bash or sshd)
solution: somehow schedule the update & exit out. You may also have to
schedule a shutdown & later re-start of cygserver.

2) You want to add new packages
Here's the route I would pursue: Create your own cygwin repository
(say, http://foosite/cygwin) with a uniquely named empty package (say,
"foo") in the "base" category. Make foo require all the packages you
want, and make sure all the remote machines have foo installed.

Any time you update foo, from the remotely logged in CL run
$ cygstart /setup.exe -q -n -s http://valid-cygwin-mirror -s
http://foosite/cygwin

regards,
NT

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