Category Archives: WSL

Windows 10 missing ssh-copy-id

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Microsoft is finally shipping Windows with SSH. On my Windows 10 machine, it’s OpenSSH:

PS C:\Users\Kasper> ssh -V
OpenSSH_for_Windows_7.7p1, LibreSSL 2.6.5

Somehow they missed to get the ssh-copy-id tool implemented, so we need to find another way of copying our ssh keys. Thankfully it’s not that complicated, we can use powershell (probably even cmd)

cat .\.ssh\id_rsa.pub | ssh -l username ssh_server "cat >> .ssh/authorized_keys"

This will concatenate (cat) your ssh key to the authorized_keys file on your ssh_server.

I’m using cat, to make it easy for Linux/unix admins, type, and get-content will also do, as both cat and type are aliases for get-content. I assume “type” will be available in cmd.exe

Ping not permitted in WSL

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Using Windows subsystem for Linux (WSL) is so nice, when you are forced to work from an inferior OS, sometimes also referred to as “a gaming console”
Especially combined with the Windows Terminal, which I wrote about here: https://www.nordal-lund.dk/?p=592 I’m sure that most Linux/Unix administrators will feel right at home.

Despite all the goodness, there are some minor annoyances preventing me from experiencing a big burst of happiness. One of them are the inability to use ping on a std. WSL Debian as a non-root user. That’s right, you need to do “sudo ping nice.little.address” or you will be denied šŸ™

The root cause is the ping utility missing the SUID bit, which it has on the real distro. Luckily there’s an easy fix, add the SUID bit to the ping utility:

sudo chmod u+s /bin/ping

Thats it, now you can ping without sudo again šŸ™‚

Happy pinging
/Kasper