I do a lot of work with Windows as well as with Linux, and I have a little trick that I’ve shared 100 times and finally decided to drop into a blog post for posterity.

So often, I’m working with groups of Windows developers trying to access Linux VM’s in Azure or Raspberry Pi’s running Raspbian and I ask them to ssh into the server.

Note: ssh is not just a tool, it’s a verb, and I concur with @shanselman who has declared that it’s correct pronunciation is much like the sound made by a downhill skier - a sort of “shoosh”. Now you know, so pass it on.

Unfortunately, many of those Windows developers commence to open PuTTY - a graphical tool for doing serial or terminal communication. If you’re opening a graphical tool for doing CLI work, there’s an inbalance in the force. You should be far more intimate with your systems terminal or command line tool and that tool should allow you to ssh.

So how do you ssh from Windows? There are a number of ways, but if you have Git for Windows installed, you probably already can if you just do one simple thing.

Git for Windows installs by default into C:\Program Files\Git. If you look in that folder, you’ll find \usr\bin. And if you look in there, you’ll find a whole ton of Linux commands, and one of those commands is ssh.

If I remember correctly, these commands are actually the Cygwin Win32 ports of most of Linux’s commands.

So to start using all of those commands, all you have to do is add C:\Program Files\Git\usr\bin to your system path.

Method 1: edit the system environment variables

Go to Start and type “environment” and then choose to “Edit the system environment variables”. Then hit the Environment Variables button, find the Path variable in either your User or System Variables, and edit it to include C:\Program Files\Git\usr\bin. Now restart any terminals and type ssh to test.

Method 2: add the path in your PowerShell profile

The method I actually use to get these commands into my path is a bit different. I add a command to my PowerShell profile. The advantage is that my profile is already sync’ed to my OneDrive account so it persists across reinstalls of Windows. So I don’t have to remember to edit my path after I reload my computer.

To do this, go to your terminal of choice and use your editor of choice to edit your $profile. I would type code $profile to use Visual Studio Code to edit it.

Then add this line somewhere in there…

$env:Path += ";C:\Program Files\Git\usr\bin"

Again, test this by restarting your terminal and simply calling ssh. Now try scp and touch and ls. Yay! But ls already worked for you you say? That’s because PowerShell has a bunch of built in aliases, and ls is an alias for dir. So the functionality is similar, but not exactly the same.

There are a bunch of these aliases, in fact. You can see the full list here. I recommend adding the following lines to your PowerShell profile to remove these aliases and unlock the real (well, almost real) Linux commands…

If(Test-Path alias:curl) { Remove-Item -Path alias:curl } #remove alias that shadows use of real curl
If(Test-Path alias:rm) { Remove-Item -Path alias:rm } #remove alias that shadows use of real rm

Enjoy!

I hate hooking a monitor up to my Raspberry Pi. It feels wrong. It feels like I should be able to do everything from the command line, and the fact is I can.

If you’re pulling your Raspberry Pi out of the box and are interested in bootstrapping without a monitor, check out my other post on Easy and Offline Connection to your Raspberry Pi.

Afterward, you may want to set up your wifi access - that is, you want to tell your pi about the wireless access points at your home, your coffee shop, or whatever.

Doing that from the command line is pretty easy, so this will be short.

You’re going to be using a utility on Raspbian called wpa_cli. This handles wireless configuration and writes its configuration into /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf. You could even just edit that file directly, but now we’re talking crazy talk. Actually, I do that sometimes, but whatever.

First, run…

wpa_cli status

…to see what the current status is. If you get Failed to connect to non-global ctrl_ifname: (null) error: No such file or directory, that’s just a ridiculously cryptic error message that means you don’t have a wifi dongle. Why they couldn’t just say “you don’t have a wifi dongle” I don’t know, but whatever.

If you do have a wifi dongle, you’ll instead see something like…

Yay! You have a wireless adapter, which means you likely have a wifi dongle plugged into a USB port. It says here that the current state is INACTIVE. That’s because you’re not connected to any access points.

To do so, you need to run scan, but at this point, you may want to enter the wpa_cli interactive mode. That means that you don’t have to keep prefixing your commands with wpa_cli, but can instead just type the commands. To enter interactive mode, just do…

wpa_cli

To get out at any time just type quit <enter>.

Now do a scan using…

scan

It’s funny, because it appears that nothing happened, but it did. Use…

scan_results

…to see what it found.

This scanning step is not necessary, by the way, there’s a good chance you already know the name (SSID) of your access point, and in that case you don’t need to do this.

Next you create a new network using…

add_network

You’ll get an integer in return. If it’s your first network, you’ll get a 0. That’s the ID of the new network you just created, and you’ll use it on these subsequent commands.

To configure your network do this…

set_network 0 ssid "mynetwork"
set_network 0 psk "mypassword"

Something I read online said that as soon as you enter this, it would start connecting, but I had to also do this to get it to connect…

select_network 0

Now there’s one more thing. If you’re like me, you don’t just connect to a single AP. I connect from home, my mifi, my local coffee shop, from work, etc. I want my pi to be able to connect from any and all of those networks.

Adding more networks is as easy as following the instructions above multiple times, but you want to set one more network property - the priority. The priority property takes an integer value and higher numbers are higher priority. That means that if I have network1 (priority 1) and network2 (priority 2), and when my pi boots it sees both of those networks, it’s going to choose to connect to network2 first because it has the higher priority.

Okay, that does it.

If you want to see everything I’ve written about the Raspberry Pi, check out codefoster.com/pi

At the time of this writing, there are two Azure portals you can use.

To get to the main, full-featured, current Azure portal, you browse to manage.windowsazure.com in any modern browser, and it looks like this…

The new portal is already available for you to play with and get familiar with, and it’s a good thing too since it takes quite a bit of getting used to. Once you grok it, though, I’m pretty sure you’ll like it better. You get to the new portal by browsing to portal.azure.com. Here’s what it looks like…

Both of these are works of modern, web art and very functional in my opinion. I love the current portal, and now that I’m accustomed to it, I love the new portal as well.

But I would like to get to the place where I have little to no need for the portals. I would like to instead to be utterly dependent on the command line.

I started some time back on the PowerShell command interface for Azure and it’s very well made. I had a hard time getting to it though. I suppose it was the long commands - the PowerShell syntax. Although it’s quite descriptive and offers good tab completion and documentation, I still found it a chore and kept at my work in the portal.

I had a glance some time ago at the node tooling for Azure as well, but didn’t really give it a fair shake. Now I’m shaking it like crazy and really excited. Check out some of these things you can do…

Check out which Ubuntu images I can use for creating a VM…

The following will generate a list of Azure VM images and allows me to pipe to a regular expression to pull out just the stable (LTS) Ubuntu images of a certain version (14.04.1). It’s also possible to add a --json property to the request and get this data back in JSON format.

azure vm image list | grep 'Ubuntu.*14_04_1.*LTS'

Create an Ubuntu Linux VM from one of those images…

Once I’ve chosen the image I want to start with, I simple call the following to create a new VM in the West US region. I add the -e parameter to add ssh capability so I can ssh into the machine when it’s finished.

azure vm create -l 'West US' VM_NAME b39f27a8b8c64d52b05eac6a62ebad85__Ubuntu_DAILY_BUILD-trusty-14_04_1-LTS-amd64-server-20141110-en-us-30GB codefoster -e

Now let’s fetch a list of my VM’s and see the new mynewubuntumachine in there…

By the way, if you’re like me and like staying in the command line interface, try installing Cygwin. It runs great in PowerShell and allows me immediately after creating this VM to ssh into it like so…

I’d rather that machine not start charging me for compute, so let’s shut it down and make it free (except for a little bit of storage… pennies)…

That’s better.

What else can we do with the azure-cli? Oh, man. Glad you asked. Let’s create a quick Azure Mobile Service, add a table, and then use some PowerShell candy to start writing and reading records.

Creating a Mobile Service…

First, we create the service like the following where gg4p4pzmfi is simply the name of my particular SQL Server. I already have it, so I may as well use that instead of creating a new one. My service is actually going to be called “cfms”.

azure mobile create --sqlServer gg4p4pzmfi cfms

Then we create a table. Let’s just punt and call it widgets. In order to show interactions with the table via simple HTTP commands, I’m going to open up the insert and read permissions so I don’t have to create authentication headers in my HTTP calls…

azure mobile table create cfms widgets -p read=public,insert=public

And there we have a service with a table ready for us. Now, in case you’ve never noticed, PowerShell natively allows us to use curl to do web requests, but curl is not really installed. Instead it’s a simple alias to the Invoke-WebRequest method in PowerShell. I chose to write the following functions into my PowerShell profile so it’s always available to me…

Function get ($uri)
{
  (Invoke-WebRequest -Uri $uri).Content;
}

Function post ($uri, $body)
{
  (Invoke-WebRequest -Uri $uri -Body $body -Method Post -ContentType "application/json").Content;
}

So now we can write a record into our new widgets table like so…

post [http://cfms.azure-mobile.net/tables/widgets](http://cfms.azure-mobile.net/tables/widgets) '{"name":"widget 1"}';

Do notice that the response we got back from this post included the actual inserted object complete with the GUID that Azure Mobile Services tacked on to it. In case you’re not already familiar with Mobile Services, you should also take note that we didn’t schematize this table when we created it. Instead, we simply created an object with a name property and let Mobile Services handle that for us.

Now, a get from the same table should show us our widget 1 record, and in fact it does…

I love how simple and elegant a solution this is.

There’s obviously a whole lot more we can do with azure-cli that I won’t take the time to detail. But there’s one more thing you should see - the inline help. For any command, simply tack on -h and you will get good information about the various possible parameters you can use. It’s contextual too. If you type azure -h, you’ll see all of the high level options for the azure-cli tool, whereas if you type azure vm -h, you’ll see specific commands for working with VM’s.

The azure -h is great for giving you an overview of what the tool will do.

I hope you have as much fun with this as I have already.

To get started, visit this page to see instructions on installing the tooling.