Comment What about cygwin on your windows desktop? (Score 1) 114
One easy way to accomplish this is to run cygwin http://www.cygwin.com/ on your windows box, setup all of your environment variables there (aliases and anything else you want), and have SSH pass your environment variables when connecting to a new box. With cygwin you get the standard openssh client, so anything you could do on a gnu box you can do there. You can get this all working and not have to change anything on the actual servers, it will all happen "automagically" on any server you log into, as long as sshd is setup to allow passing env. variables. Cygwin also lets you do all kinds of nifty things, like executing shell scripts from your windows box that log into the linux servers and execute commands. I've found that this is a great way to eliminate the human error factor when running identical commands on many servesr. Write a short script that will SSH in with SSH keys, run the script, verify the output/results and then display the results to the screen. Typically it doesn't save you too much time, as you need to write/test the script, but if can save you from making silly typos on production machines, and if your working on many servers, it can save time in the end. Nothing like a for do loop that iterates through all hosts and applies patches etc.
I also like one persons suggestion to put all the variables into a shell script on a webserver, and when you first log into a box you could just run wget -O - http://server/script.sh | bash or something along those lines.
Aliases in themselves are not a risk, it's only when they are impoperly used. For example, aliasing rm -rf / to something your might accidentally type isn't a good idea. However, if used carefully they can be very convinient and save quite a bit of time. I used them extensivly in my early unix admin days, but I found that they only caused me pain later when I would work on a box without my aliases and I'd be constantly retyping things and trying to remember what the actual command that I wanted was that my alias ran. Similar to people who don't know anyone's phone numbers because they are all stored in their cell's memory. It's great until you don't have it any you don't know any numbers.
I also like one persons suggestion to put all the variables into a shell script on a webserver, and when you first log into a box you could just run wget -O - http://server/script.sh | bash or something along those lines.
Aliases in themselves are not a risk, it's only when they are impoperly used. For example, aliasing rm -rf / to something your might accidentally type isn't a good idea. However, if used carefully they can be very convinient and save quite a bit of time. I used them extensivly in my early unix admin days, but I found that they only caused me pain later when I would work on a box without my aliases and I'd be constantly retyping things and trying to remember what the actual command that I wanted was that my alias ran. Similar to people who don't know anyone's phone numbers because they are all stored in their cell's memory. It's great until you don't have it any you don't know any numbers.
