Cygwin

I've worked on it before, but somehow never felt the need for it (cygwin) until now. Imagine a situation where you want to transfer files from your windows notebook to another comp on the LAN. But the problems is that the windows Network File System doesn't work! Probably something wrong with the network settings; too many subnets here.

Anywayz, I have to find another way of transferring the files. FTP I thought. Also, I remembered a fileupload program which I coded in PHP sometime ago which I could use. I could not locate that in my NB. I was quite proud of that code segment, since it was a remote file manager kinda thingy...

Anywayz... let me get back on track...

I went in search of FTP servers and ended up with Baracuda, which also gives a HTTP file uploading mechanism. Pretty nifty util. But the problem with HTTP uploading is multiple uploads! I cant transfer a directory unless I compress the darn thing! That takes too long...

I remembered the SSH program which I used to transfer files to websites sometime ago, and thought of finding a SSH server. This led me to openssh.

Now, openssh does not have a version for windows. But it DOES have a version for Cygwin. Which leads me to Cygwin.

Cygwin is an UNIX environment in Windows. It says in the website that it has a DLL which basically parses the commands in the cygwin window and I guess converts it into a Windows understandable form.

Anyway, so I downloaded Cygwin and installed SSH, and still couldn't connect, till I realised that the server has windows firewall enabled. It was recently reinstalled and was also fitted in with SP2. Which reminds me, I have to upgrade my NB to SP2. Nah... too risky...

Anyway, I disabled the firewall (too lazy to enable the sockets) and voila, its working. Now my question is, was the firewall the original reason that Windows NFS didn't work? NM! At least I experimented on cygwin.

Reminds me of all the OS tools that were discussed during FOSSED. Reminded me of WINE, and some other stuff. Think I might join one of those groups and do a bit of coding! I miss coding... Well thats another blog altogether!