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Automating Tasks on Windows with Ansible
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Not that long ago, the lines were clearly drawn when it came to operating systems: Linux was in one camp as a finely tunable and largely POSIX-compatible Unix-style operating system, thanks to its built-in permissions management – with stability and reliability as the icing on the cake. In the other camp was Windows, which crashed frequently, failed when it came to effective remote management, and posed a constant security headache.
Today's landscape is nowhere near as black and white as the picture I just painted. Ever since Microsoft ditched the MS-DOS underpinnings on which Windows XP sat and revamped the old NT kernel, Microsoft has also delivered a fully POSIX-compatible operating system that can do far more than many Linux admins realize. In fact, when it comes to remote administration, you can now use SSH to control Windows, just like a Linux system (Figure 1).
Figure 1: Remote administration over SSH is a standard procedure on Linux, but the SSH protocol is also accessible on Windows via the OpenSSH server.
Ansible on Windows
Controlling Windows over SSH has practical and highly beneficial implications in terms of everyday use. For example, the developers of
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