I’m a Unix administrator who also has to work with various MS Windows servers. For various tasks, I’m a lot more productive using the Unix tools that I’m familiar with and for a long time, I’ve been using Cygwin on my local workstation. Now, I’d like to set up Cygwin on certain Windows servers so that I can SSH into them and use the same tools for administrative tasks.
In previous versions, Cygwin would map Windows to POSIX users and permissions from a /etc/passwd
and /etc/groups
files
but now it directly uses Active Directory on the domain controller to authenticate users. The Cygwin FAQ has been updated with instructions for setting up SSHD on a domain:
First of all, create a new domain account called "cyg_server". This account must be an administrative account, so make sure it's in the "Administrators" group.
Now create a domain policy which is propagated to all machines which are supposed to run an sshd service. This domain policy should give the following user rights to the "cyg_server" account:
Act as part of the operating system (SeTcbPrivilege) Create a token object (SeCreateTokenPrivilege) Replace a process level token (SeAssignPrimaryTokenPrivilege)
I have administrator access to the AD domain controller (which runs on Windows Server 2008 R2) and I’ve created the cyg_server
domain account as a member of the Administrators
group. However, I don’t know enough about Windows administration to follow the remaining instructions.
I presume “domain policy” refers to group policies but I really don’t know anything about group policies. I thought this question seemed relevant but it didn’t have enough detail for me to make use of it.