Configuring a SSH Client on Windows 10
The first step is identifying the versions of the OpenSSH components we want to install, for this guide we will only be installing the SSH Agent, not the server. All of the following will need to be executed from a Elevated PowerShell Prompt.
This will spit out two capabilities, we want the client:
Which we can install with the following command:
This will result in the terse, but explanatory:
If you’re like me you might assume you can start the service and get on with your day (I did). However this isn’t Unix my dude, this is Windows and it has to be a bit harder, but hey that’s why we earn the big bucks:
Will fail with the unhelpful “Service ‘OpenSSH Authentication Agent (ssh-agent)’ cannot be started due to the following error” and the error “Cannot start service ssh-agent on computer ‘.’.” — thanks Windows.
You can do a bit of poking about with PowerShell:
Only to find out that the service is indeed stopped:
To find out why we need to dig a bit deeper:
Which tells us the service is disabled:
Now we can change that quite easily:
Now we can start the service:
And check it works with ssh-add:
Which now tells us the agent has no identities:
It’s not the smoothest of experiences, but at least I didn’t have to compile OpenSSH from source this time.
