SSHD Broken under Cygwin

A word of warning, be very, very careful when changing permissions of anything that Cygwin uses, in fact don't even think about doing it because more likely than not you will break it.

I came across this problem today when I changed the ownership on a Cygwin directory from SYSTEM to Administrators.

This broke SSH and the service would not start, it fails with the message "The service did not start or respond in a timely manner" or some nonsense like that.

The way to fix this is as follows

1. delete the file /var/log/sshd.log
2. open a bash shell and cd to /var
3. chown SYSTEM.none empty
4. chmod 0600 empty
5. cd to /etc and do
6. chown SYSTEM.none ssh*key
7. chmod 0600 ssh*key

you should now be able to start the SSH Daemon by either net start sshd or cygrunsrv -S sshd or starting it through services.msc

WOOOO!!! MAC WOOOO!!!

well this Christmas has got to be one of the best ever!
My fantastic wife made it so special for me it almost felt like being a child again, being shooed off to bed so that the presents could be laid out when we came down in the morning and all that.

She also managed to get me my mac mini and a few other bits and pieces without me realising it. This you might think would be simple but normally nothing happens in our house without me knowing about it, probably down to my unceasing need to know everything, even if it is none of my business!

When I unwrapped it on christmas morning there were a few choice words spoken, mostly unrepeatable...

Needless to say that it is one of the nicest bits of engineering that I have had the pleasure of using; OS X is such a joy to use, everything seems to fall to hand without thinking about it. It just seems to come naturally, even to someone with an almost exclusively windows background.

Expose just makes life so much more manageable and iPhoto is amazing. I havent had to install a single driver for any of the peripherals that I have hooked up to it. I still have to get used to some of its quirks like CTRL + "end" does not take you to the end of the line, only the end of the word.

And the fact that I am using a windows keyboard so I need to memorise which windows key maps to which Apple key.

Networking was picked up out of the box and just worked, even our strange VPN connection.

Anyway, I think I need a full day just to play around with it and learn more about where things go and how the permissions work.
I have spent far too long already messing about with the dock, the genie effect is so mesmerising...