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a whole other shell
Friday, September 14 2018
I like the work I get in my new workplace, though (in terms of how I am being managed) things are definitely weird. Today, for example, I had nothing left on my plate to do. I suppose I could've (or should've) said something about this to the people to whom I report. But today they seemed extremely busy, and I didn't want to disturb them. I know from my experience of being a manager that it's better just not to know when someone who reports to me has run out of work. I'd rather they teach themselves a new skill or add comments to their code or something. An employee complaining about not having anything to do is sort of like a child doing the same thing. Maybe in the 1970s it was possible to run out of things to do, but with the internet available 100% of the time, there's always something to do. I prefer to be an employee who is very responsive to direction and who otherwise stays out of the way. If they needed me to do something, I would've immediately done it. But otherwise I was going to...?
I quickly identified a problem related to the nature of the shop. It's a Microsoft shop, one using virtual Microsoft servers in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud. Microsoft technology is what I began with in my web development career, but I have migrated away from it over the years, embracing open source technology where possible (though I did do a burst of work on Microsoft servers in the spring of 2006 and I also handled a migration from Microsoft technology and Cold Fusion back in 2010). I've become comfortable administering Linux servers at the command line, an interface that is easy both to document and automate. GUIs have their uses, but documenting them requires images and automating them is either impossible or an arcane skill. And there's another problem with GUIs, particularly remote desktop software (which makes a remote server's GUI OS appear in a window on a remote computer): only one person can use it at a time. In this shop, this obstacle has led to a policy of informally "taking" and "releasing" the servers via a message in a Slack channel. If we were using Linux servers, there would be no such problem; we could all be logged in via SSH as superusers, working wherever we needed to work. It would only be a problem if two of us were, say, editing httpd.conf (the Apache web server configuration file) at the same time. This made me wonder: does Microsoft have an SSH server available? Using such a facility, one could then administer a Windows server from the command line just like a Linux server. The language of the commands would be a little different and the directory structure would be the annoying one Windows computers use, but it would be possible to delete, copy, and edit files, run scripts, and that sort of thing. And one could do it without stepping on anyone else's toes, particularly those using a remote desktop connection.
My research today revealed that Windows 10 does indeed have an SSH server built into it, and all one has to do is enable it. For my particular work computer, which runs Windows 10 Home (I know, embarrassing), there was no such server. But it turned out that it was possible to install one (and to enable or install pretty much anything else I needed that Windows 10 Home normally lacks). Once that was in place, I was able to use my personal laptop to initiate an SSH session into my work laptop to do various things. Now all I needed to do was get approval to turn on the SSH dæmon on my employer's windows servers. But that could wait.
In the process of doing all of that, I learned of the existence of an alternative to the Windows command shell (cmd.exe) that has existed since Windows 7 at least. It's called PowerShell, and it looks generally similar, though it has a more intuitive editing facility, can be resized nicely, and has a brand new scripting language of its own (also called PowerShell; Microsoft is terrible at naming things; if you don't believe me, try researching .NET). Unfortunately, that scripting language was apparently designed by a moron. I use Windows computers every day of my life and consider myself fairly well-informed. How had I never heard of it?
Towards the end of the day, I installed a few other necessary things on my computer, such as git. I would've felt like I'd had a pretty useless day had not the head honcho come by to tell me he thought I was doing a great job.
Back at the house, Gretchen had a gift-wrapped present for me. It was Bad Blood by John Carreyrou, the meticulously-reported tale of Theranos, the disgraced (and deeply fraudulent) biotech company that was briefly worth nine billion dollars (American ones, not the Zimbabwean kind). I climbed into the bathtub and made it a good fifty pages in before my bath concluded.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?180914 feedback
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