Support for Windows instances?

[spease]

How hard do you think it would be to add support for Windows instances? Either yourself or someone else.

[jonhoo]

There isn't anything Linux-specific about the way we spawn instances. The tricky part is connecting to them and issuing commands; Windows servers don't currently provide SSH access, but instead just allow RDP connections (which aren't create for automation). There are ways to set up SSH access on Windows machines, but it requires some work. There may already be AMIs available with this support built-in though.

I think it's fairly unlikely that this crate will get RDP support, and images with SSH support should work out of the box, so I'm tempted to close this issue. Unless you have an alternative proposal in mind?

[spease]

There's powershell, but I don't know of a rust library for it, or even whether the protocol is open.

[jonhoo]

Unfortunately PowerShell isn't generally remotely accessible on Windows instances as far as I can tell. If you could install and start an SSH server, then it could very well be that you can issue commands to PowerShell just like you to do bash on Linux hosts (i.e., through Session::cmd).

[spease]

You can configure it with Enable-PSRemote and some additional steps. Windows users generally don't understand ssh and are likely going to be very hesitant to install it. I don't know how common it is for people to use windows on aws, just that that's what the culture is like where I'm working now.

[jonhoo]

I think enabling remote PowerShell is outside the scope of this crate, so let's assume that the user chooses a Windows AMI that already has it enabled. In that case, what we'd want is an alternative to ssh::Session that instead runs commands using the remote PowerShell. Judging from this page, we should be able to use std::process:Command and execute commands using something like:

Invoke-Command -ComputerName INSTANCE_IP -ScriptBlock { COMMAND } -credential USERNAME

The equivalent of spawning a session (in ssh2) would be

Enter-PSSession -ComputerName INSTANCe_IP -Credential USERNAME

and then feeding commands on STDIN using

Invoke-Command -Session $s {$h = Get-HotFix}

We'd also need to set up authentication somehow. This page suggests

winrm s winrm/config/client '@{TrustedHosts="RemoteComputer"}'

but I don't know if that works with just giving IP addresses. Some more documentation is given here, but nothing that gives further detail on authentication. There's SkipNetworkProfileCheck:

Enable-PSRemoting -SkipNetworkProfileCheck -Force
Set-NetFirewallRule -Name "WINRM-HTTP-In-TCP-PUBLIC" -RemoteAddress Any

but that seems to have no security. I don't know how to fix that. Maybe this SO question holds some more answers for more Windows-savvy users?

Unfortunately, all this also requires the user's machine to be running Windows (to have access to PowerShell locally).

[spease]

Actually it looks like PowerShell is open source now...

https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell

So it might be feasible to package it somehow, and it looks like it's feasible to point users at a package for their particular system from that page.