On Windows machines, what is the typical toolchain for remote maintenance?
- by Hanno Fietz
I need to deploy PHP and Python code and the appropriate environment (web server, db server) to remote Windows systems, and I don't know what toolchain would be the equivalent to ssh, scp, bash and the like.
So, basically, what I need to be able to do is the following:
access remote Windows with the appropriate privileges in a secure manner, like I routinely do with ssh (I don't even know whether that would be a text or graphic interface on Windows).
remotely install software: Apache or IIS, MySQL or Postgres, Python or PHP
copy files from remote (the application we're deploying)
remotely configure the machine to run regular tasks (e. g. checking for updates to the application)
automate tasks like downloading files from a designated place
The main question is probably how I get onto the machine securely in the first place, and then the rest is general Windows admin knowledge, which probably is too broad a scope to fit into one question.
I have years of experience with maintaining Linux boxes and I have used tools of varying sophistication on those, ranging from plain scping of PHP files to deployment of Java application containers and even full VMs with Vagrant.
On Windows, I'm a complete noob, and I don't even know where to start. I have installed Apache, MySQL , PHP on a desktop machine maybe twice in my life, that's about it.
Bonus points for things that work from a Linux machine at my end, but I could run a VM and do everything from there.
