One of the less beloved tasks at my new gig is dealing with the MS Windows desktops -- Win9x, NT, 2K, and XP. I've been looking for tools to ease the pain, and have a few which are somewhat promising.

PuTTY and VNC are pretty familiar to the folk here. They're somewhat complimentary, in that PuTTY allows one to use VNC to connect to remote systems securely. So if I am camped out for hours on a Win box to debug it, I can at least access my Linux system in either CLI or graphical mode.

Cygwin is a port of GNU tools to the MS Windows system. It includes a number of nice touches, including an XFree86 por. This runs windowed on your Windows desktop -- neither a "full screen" nor an "unmanaged" mode are available, but it's pretty good, and generally is both faster and cleaner in appearance than VNC. There's also an ssh service, which means you can run sshd on the box, and connect to it remotely. Googling "ssh cygwin" will put the tips/config page at the top of the stack.

I've noticed that concurrencies appear to be an issue. While I can run multiple cygwin shells from the desktop, I only seem to have one or two remote connection concurrencies. Anyone have data on this?

One general downside to Cygwin is that it's almost a virtualized environment within the host. This differes from UWIN, which last I looked at it, allowed you to view system state, including processes, resources, and a really handy virtual filesystem representing the system registry. This allows a slew of sysadmin tasks to be moved from the NT paradigm to UWIN. No dice under Cygwin best I can tell. My understanding is that Cygwin is more a developer environment than an admin one.

The other thing I haven't worked out yet as well is being able to browse remote file shares from within Cygwin. I'm fine if I map the share to a driveletter, but...waitaminute...

;-)

Just worked it out:

ls '\\\\server\\share'

will provide a listing. To "mount" the shares (really, just providing a filesystem access point to them):

mkdir /net
ln -s '\\\\server\\share' /net/share

...where server and share are the server and share you want to access.

I've also found it handy to provide mappings from /cygdrive/driveletter to the root directory using symlinks, as the /cygdrive facility also appears to be virtual.

Not sure about how you authenticate initially, but that's another battle.