MobaSSH Server for ssh connection to Windows PC

Question

BACKGROUND:

I need a new backup solution. Unfortunately, most of my private pc's are operating Windows, i.e., no native rsync support but a bunch of alternative tools, which become either monetized or don't work well enough (I would, therefore, kindly ask to refrain from "solutions" such as "try rsync for windows alternative XY" unless you are really convinced that said tool is entirely free and comes with full rsync capabilities). Thus, I want to get a ssh server running, to use rsync out of MobaXterm (cygwin like Unix enviroment for Windows). There exists a tool that seemingly does this nicely: MobaSSH (https://mobassh.mobatek.net/)

QUESTION:

After playing around with the OpenSSH Client and Server that now comes in Windows, I realized that ssh/scp works like a charm with this solution, but rsync is (for now) not supported and it does not seem like it is coming soon. Thus, I am using MobaSSH as ssh server. On a machine where I did not play around with the Windows OpenSSH Server, MobaSSH works and I can, e.g., connect as:

ssh localhost

However, on the machine I need it, this is not possible, i.e., USER and PASSWORD combination of the windows user account are not recognized and I get a

Permission denied.

after above command. (Having only one USER on the windows machine, this is the same as trying

ssh USER@localhost

directly.)

So far I tried deinstalling the Windows OpenSSH Server App and reinstalling MobaSSH.

I am positive that USER and PASSWORD are the once to login into Windows.

Since it works without problems on a different machine, I suspect that there are some registry entries or anything that are screwed up after setting up the OpenSSH Server that a simple deinstall did not catch. Does anyone have a clue what could got wrong and/or ideas where to look at?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Okay, a couple of issues I found to finally make this work:

1) Windows suggests that USER and HOSTNAMES are not case-sensitive, i.e., it occasionally prints it wrong, e.g., when using ssh localhost, without specifying the user. This is of course not correct, i.e., this is fixed by always specifying USER/HOSTNAMES manually.

2) MobaSSH comes with quite nice functionality, however, only for the payed version. The free version does NOT permit to change any default. One of this default being that password login is disabled, i.e., one has to setup an rsa keypair. Traditionally this would require to login by password first, but obviously on can work around if one has full access to the windows machine. Thus, fix here is to first setup the password-less login (copy key into /USR/.ssh/authorized_keys).

Unfortunately, this also means that I cannot recommend anyone to use MobaSSH.

3) The windows firewall blocks port 22. As far as I understand, the idea is to setup permissions for specific programs to use (some) ports. This appears to be setup correctly when installing MobaSSH, however, despite the incoming rules exist in the firewall settings and appear correct to me, the port remains blocked. The only fix I managed (well, despite disabling the firewall) was to add an exception for the port 22, independent of the program.

I don't know whether or not this is intended or the exception for MobaSSH is not setup correctly (although to me it looks like it is).

In summary, above points solve the problem as stated in the post, with the caveat of probably not being a perfect solution.