Secure Shell for Release Deployment - Trials & Tribulations

Recently it was decided at the large State government facility where I work that Secure Shell (SSH) would be used to facilitate the deployment of application software to the servers. This approach has a number of advantages. All data transfers are encrypted. Key pairs can be used to automate the authentication, so the entire transfer can be scripted with Shell scripts. Plus, with SSH’s ability to execute remote commands, command-line utilities on the target server could be utilized to stop and start services and web sites as necessary during the deployments.

Since most of the target servers that host our applications are Windows servers, that meant installing a 3rd party SSH server. The State opted for OpenSSH, the Open Source SSH implementation. To get that to work in a Windows environment requires Cygwin, a “linux-like” shell environment that runs under Windows. Getting this to work in a default environment is a snap. Getting it to work in a complex environment which includes Active Directory, domain controllers, and Group Policy Objects has proved to be quite a challenge. We are making progress, and I’ll probably write up the entire process in a “How-To” article in the near future. In the mean-time, I’m struggling with one weird error trying to stop and start web-sites.

We are using a command-line utility named iisweb.vbs to stop and start the services. The ID we are running the script under appears to have the necessary privileges to use this utility (being a Domain Admin), but when it executes, it errors out with the message “Could not create an instance of the CmdLib object. Please register the Microsoft.CmdLib component.” The funny thing is, this was working until yesterday, when the server teams re-built the server in order to re-partition the drives. Any help would definitely be appreciated.

Jp

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