Cygwin + TightVNC = Windows remote access heaven (and a possible .Net winner...)
Cygwin always was good at making Windows more usable, but it now has SSH server capabilities which means I can log in to a Windows machine remotely (and fairly securely.) A useful guide to setting it up is here. Now some windows applications will barf if run from a Cygwin command prompt because they get confused by the UNIX environment, but in a Cygwin shell you can always run 'cmd' to get a Windows command shell, so that should solve this problem.
If I also put TightVNC on the machine I can now not just remotely SSH login, but also choose to take over the desktop (with a little help from SSH port forwarding). If you do this, you need to allow 'loopback connections' (there's a checkbox in the VNC config window).
Why do all this? Well one reason is .Net . I like the look of .Net from a development perspective since C# has some nice features, and the .Net platform is pretty rich. But my SysAdmin side (get back in the box damn you! :) ) chokes at the idea of deploying any kind of real application on a Windows server farm. Stability isn't so much the issue these days (apart from IIS, but I think the Redmond boys are working on that), but manageability is because you *need* terminal services or the like running. I've deployed real applications on real server farms and I would take 6 open shell prompts over 6 open terminal service windows any day.
But if I had SSHD installed on all the Windows Servers in my farm that would make a real difference. There's still things you need the GUI environment for, but with VNC running that enables that too. So double bonus!
2:09:36 PM 
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