Installing OpenSSH in Windows

One of my very first technical blog posts was about running OpenSSH on Windows - written over 14 years ago. Recently I was playing around with Microsoft's port of OpenSSH, which has officially achieved version v1.0.0.0 beta status. Installation was pretty easy, but I ran into a little problem: needing to set "user" group permissions. This little gist has my final script. For reasons of my own I didn't feel like running the chocolatey install, so I don't know if it has this permission problem.

$toolsDir = "c:\tools"
$sshZip = "$toolsDir\OpenSSH-Win64.zip"
$sshDir = "$toolsDir\OpenSSH-Win64"
$install = "$sshDir\install-sshd.ps1"

# Download OpenSSH
$url = "https://github.com/PowerShell/Win32-OpenSSH/releases/download/v1.0.0.0/OpenSSH-Win64.zip"
Invoke-WebRequest -Uri $url -OutFile $sshZip

# Unzip the OpenSSH archive
Expand-Archive -LiteralPath $sshZip -DestinationPath $toolsDir

# Install SSH
Invoke-Expression $install

# Absolutely necessary: the users group must have appropriate permissions on the OpenSSH folder
$acl = Get-Acl $sshDir
$ar = New-Object System.Security.AccessControl.FileSystemAccessRule(".\users","ReadAndExecute,Synchronize", "ContainerInherit,ObjectInherit", "None", "Allow")
$acl.SetAccessRule($ar)
Set-Acl $sshDir $acl

# Open firewall and set service startup policy
New-NetFirewallRule -Name sshd -DisplayName 'OpenSSH Server (sshd)' -Enabled True -Direction Inbound -Protocol TCP -Action Allow -LocalPort 22
Set-Service sshd -StartupType Automatic