NetCmdlets Invoke-Telnet?! And other PowerShell madness.

August 11, 2008 · 2 min read

On last week’s PowerScripting Podcast, Jonathan Walz and Hal Rottenberg interview /n software’s Eric Madariaga about NetCmdlets and (PowerShellASP).

My favorite part was when Hal was shocked to hear that a telnet cmdlet was added to the v2 beta.  Hahaha.  I completely agree – who uses telnet anymore?  But that was actually the biggest request we got from people who were using v1 of!  We already had cmdlets for executing commands over ssh…but people really wanted telnet.  This shows you how many sys admins are still using this older means of working remotely.  Jonathan was under the impression that telnet isn’t included on Vista – he’s correct that it is not installed by default, but you can install it from the Windows Features Control Panel tool.

Hal asked Eric how the PowerShell server managed the keys that are used for its SSH authentication.  The answer is that it doesn’t.  The PowerShell server only supports user/password authentication, not public key authentication.  If the demand is there, public key authentication can be added pretty easily (we already have this technology implemented in our IP*Works! SSH developer toolkit). With PowerShell Server, you point it to a Windows user group that is allowed to authenticate, and when you connect to it you use that user/password.  I’ve been meaning to do a blog post comparing remoting through WinRM (what PowerShell 2 uses) with remoting through the NetCmdlets PowerShell Server, but I haven’t gotten around to it.  Long story short?  PowerShell Server is SIMPLE.

Eric mentioned the fact that Sapien has integrated PowerShellASP support into PrimalScript, which is awesome.  PrimalScript is a fabulous editor.

Also mentioned in the interview: 

  • PoshBoard, which is an awesome PowerShell dashboard that Hal told me about a while ago.  The developer, Antoine Habert, contacted me about integrating PowerShellASP with it.  Lots of really cool potential here.
  • On the NetCmdlets road-map: SharePoint cmdlets, EC2 and SimpleDb cmdlets, BizTalk cmdlets, Shipping (FedEx, UPS, USPS) cmdlets.
  • Free hobbyist license of NetCmdlets.
  • The famous.  There’s a “PowerShell Driven” Flickr group where you can upload a picture of your car (or laptop, or whatever else) sporting your new PowerShell sticker!
  • /n software doesn’t have a NetCmdlets blog.  At least not an official one. :)
This article is part of the GWB Archives. Original Author: Lance Robinson

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