With the new version of Cygwin, SSH suddenly doesn’t seem to phone $HOME anymore. Which is usually going to be set to something like c:\Users\<username>. In general Cygwin is supposed to look at $HOME first and then use alternative home settings, such as /etc/passwd.
The quick fix is to make sure the relevant entry in /etc/passwd matches what you have in $HOME.
Everytime I install Cygwin I find myself rooting around for the “more” command. It’s been removed in favor of “less”, however I prefer “more”. It’s more or less (ha! Linux humor!) a simpler pager.
Install the util-linux package for a random collection of older utilities, including “more” and “whereis”.
For a simple and free (and fairly standard!) way to secure your remote desktop sessions — and without having to figure out the crazy, proprietary Microsoft security stuff — take a look at copSSH. copSSH uses a streamlined Cygwin client to setup an SSH sever on your Windows box.
I’ve recently been using copSSH and PuTTY‘s Pageant authentication agent to tunnel RDP through PuTTY/copSSH SSH connections. Works like a charm.
One gotcha: copSSH doesn’t clean-up after itself well. Consider running taskkill from time-to-time.
C:\WINDOWS\Taskkill /F /IM bash.exe /T
Or if you prefer bashing:
$ kill -9 `ps | grep ^I.*bash$ | cut -c2-9`
Accrue more than 64 zombied PTYs and you’ll find yourself locked out of the server.