OpenSSH as an alternative to Cygwin

[dylanmei]

Cygwin is a moving target due to the way it's installed and the way it fetches latest packages. OpenSSH 6.2 is stable and, while not offering the same kind of bash/sh support and features that Cygwin gave us -- chmod, sleep, wget, etc -- between traditional windows command-line tools and Powershell we have all the gadgets we should need.

[dylanmei]

Referencing issue #4

[dylanmei]

Hey Joe, what do you think? I realize it's a lot of change.
Also, are you experiencing the problem with Packer 3.9 where the vagrantfile template isn't used at all?

[joefitzgerald]

I haven't got that far; there is an error (similar to this: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9811020/windows-batch-file-error-unexpected-at-this-time-error) when installing VMware tools that prevents tools from being installed. I ran things from start to finish two days ago, but I haven't had a chance to resolve the VMware tools issue yet. In general though, things look good (packer connected successfully via OpenSSH!).

[dylanmei]

I repro'd this on 2008/vmware and found the nested quoting confusing the interpreter when dealing with the parens in "..\Program Files (x86)..". Escaping them with a hat ^ resolves it.

With Packer 3.9 there's less hoops to go through installing the virtualbox guest tools when you use the new attach option. It's literally just

cmd /c certutil -addstore -f "TrustedPublisher" A:\oracle-cert.cer
cmd /c E:\VBoxWindowsAdditions.exe /S 

I believe there's the same/similar feature for the vmware builder though I haven't gotten around to trialing out "tools_upload_flavor" and "tools_upload_path". Probably we should because what we have here is very hairy cmd syntax.

[joefitzgerald]

I actually started out using tools_upload_flavor / tools_upload_path, and I switched over to downloading to ensure we always use the latest version of the tools. This ensures users don't get bugged by VMware Workstation to upgrade the tools when Fusion is one version behind, and vice versa.

That said, I agree - it's probably better to just put up with that and potentially have a CI build for each variant (Fusion / Workstation) to resolve that issue rather than downloading the tools.