Windows – Shared Cygwin Install

bashcygwinsshsymlinkwindows

I'm attempting to set up OpenSSH on a bunch of Windows Server 2003 machines in an automated fashion. My goal is to be able to do so using a single version of Cygwin installed on a network drive instead of manually installing it on each machine.

I can install cygwin just fine, but start running into problems when I try to run ssh-host-config.

$ ssh-host-config
bash: /usr/bin/ssh-host-config: Permission denied

Ok, not a big deal. I chmod 555 everythingin /usr/bin.

$ ssh-host-config
/usr/share/csih/cygwin-service-installation-helper.sh: line 689: /usr/bin/awk: cannot execute binary file

This is where I get stuck. Running

petters@BTSOTTSTBAL507 /usr/bin
$ awk
bash: /usr/bin/awk: cannot execute binary file

Here are the contents of awk:

!<symlink>gawk.exe

Just as a note, I can run gawk.exe just fine and have tried installing Cygwin with the CYGWIN=winsymlinks environment variable set.

I have also noticed the following –

petters@BTSOTTSTBAL507 /usr/bin
$ ls -l
total 366592    
-rwxr-xr-x 1 ???????? ????????   54798 Feb  4 19:02 [.exe
-rwxr-xr-x 1 ???????? ????????   23566 May 18  2010 addftinfo.exe
-rwxr-xr-x 1 ???????? ????????  165806 May 18  2010 afmtodit
-rwxr-xr-x 1 ???????? ????????    1786 May 17  2010 apropos
-rwxr-xr-x 1 ???????? ????????   47118 Feb  4 19:01 arch.exe
-rwxr-xr-x 1 ???????? ????????    8206 Apr 29 00:43 ascii.exe

In other words, the ownership data is messed up.

My impression is that cygwin 1.7.x was portable but maybe not? Any help is appreciated!

Best Answer

There are 2 issues you're facing.

First up is the difference between Cygwin's posix-y view of permissions and ownership vs Windows. You'll want to read Using Windows security in Cygwin. The ???????? is displayed because the files are owned by a user that is not defined on the local machine. If you're in a domain, you can probably run mkpasswd and mkgroup and using the output to create appropriate /etc/passwd and /etc/groups. However, they will only include the machine-specific accounts of the host where they were created.

Which segues nicely to the second issue:

Cygwin saves most of its configuration settings in or under /etc. So sharing /etc across multiple hosts is very difficult. Likewise, most Cygwin processes will assume /tmp and /var are also machine specific.

You might be able to get this to work by creating local directories on each machine, such as: c:\cygwin\etc, c:\cygwin\tmp, and c:\cygwin\var. You will need to populate etc and var with the expected files and directories. Then you'll need to create a /etc/fstab that brings all of these together into a complete filesystem. You'll want to read Mapping path names for more on that.

Also keep in mind that any time your network drive is unavailable, any running Cygwin processes may hang, crash, or just behave oddly.

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