I know some folks have used Fabric (or more specifically Paramiko; Fabric itself simply wraps Paramiko) to target Windows SSH servers (of which there are at least a few), but it's definitely a minority use case and not one I have personal experience with - which is why I can't give a simple yes/no answer.
SSH itself is entirely shell agnostic, so it really comes down to two aspects of the server software in question: - How well does it speak the SSH protocol, as implemented by OpenSSH (which is the gold standard and what Fabric/Paramiko are typically tested against). If it does weird things it's more likely to not work well. We unfortunately don't/can't prioritize a platform that has few users and is difficult for us to personally test on. - What is it actually doing with your commands - is it spawning a bash process (Cygwin, WSL bash, etc), running Powershell, or even running the Windows DOS prompt? This will determine what you want to be sending to it. I assume the SSHD in question will document what it does here. Finally, there are some minor features in Fabric which assume a Unix shell on the remote end, but these are typically conveniences you can readily work around. Hope that helps some, Jeff On Wed, Sep 9, 2020 at 5:32 PM <ch...@cmsconstruct.com> wrote: > I would also be interested if this is the case (or direction). > > > > A few years ago when I was looking for a library providing an OS agnostic > shell wrapper in Python, I ended up using Fabric for Linux/Unix and writing > my own wrapper for PowerShell on Windows. Now that the open-source version > of PowerShell (pwsh) has been out for a while and working on UX variants, I > recently had a go at using it. But the required OS libraries for security > models (NTLM/Kerberos/etc) on the different Linux variants… too convoluted > for an generic wrapper. > > > > My use-case needed to talk to all servers in any customer’s datacenter, > without provisioning agents or changing any configurations. I needed to use > what was already there, which meant PowerShell (and not SSH) on Windows. > FWIW, my purpose was to automate discovery of software application > dependencies as input into application/service modeling and monitoring > downstream. If it’s helpful, you can see the PowerShell wrapper I created > in the Open Content Platform project (github.com/opencontentplatform/ocp). > > > > What I found was that OpenSSH was pretty close to being uniform across the > Windows and UX variants; heck, it’s even available now in the Features list > in recent Server or workstation builds. But pwsh, which requires OpenSSH > at least currently… not close enough for my liking. > > > > > > *From:* Fab-user <fab-user-bounces+chris=cmsconstruct....@nongnu.org> *On > Behalf Of *Paulo Roberto de Souza Carvalho > *Sent:* Wednesday, September 9, 2020 2:57 PM > *To:* fab-user@nongnu.org > *Subject:* Does Fabric work on Windows? > > > > I ask because on all the pages I entered I only found > examples of Unix / Linux commands. > -- Jeff Forcier Unix sysadmin; Python engineer http://bitprophet.org
