I know this is Windows and not Linux but wondering if someone here may know more about this considering it's normally an app used under Linux.

I'm trying to set it up going through a tutorial but I'm getting stuck When I try to start the service I get an error so I check the log and this is the error:

/var/empty must be owned by root and not group or world-writable.

Keeping in mind this is under Windows, this error makes no sense. There is no /var/empty folder (there is a c:\program files\openssh\var\empty folder however) and there is no root user. Really not sure what to do from here.

Not that I have a clue, but you could try changing the owner and permissions of the folder c:\program files\openssh\var\empty to Administrator; you have to logon as as Administrator and click on the folder, permissions etc. Worth trying anyway..

Yeah tried that.

Also lot of sites say to run some sshd-config file or something but that does not exist in windows obviously, and it's not in the openssh bin folder either.

Do I need to install cygwin too maybe?

What tutorial? Post the URL (both because I want to learn about the same topic and because we can answer your questions better if we can see the tutorial you used).

I assume you installed some part of cygwin (probably not enough of it) and /var/empty is inside cygwin and you don't understand cygwin well enough to know where to look for it nor what to do with it.

But I need to know more about what part of cygwin you installed (unless there is another way to do ssh in Windows) before I can answer anything.

Edit: I typed the above having seen only your first post. So now I see you've installed a lot less of cygwin than I would expect you to need (understatement if you really installed none of it). But still without seeing the tutorial I don't know what parts of cywin, if any, you need.

This is the tutorial I originally started on but then saw the link for win2k3 so I went to that one.

http://pigtail.net/LRP/printsrv/cygwin-sshd.html

win2k3: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~smp/projects/ssh-windows/

Sorry, now that I see that win2k3 tutorial, I realize the half way cygwin environment it describes is beyond my expertise. I barely understand the interaction of cygwin security concepts with Windows security concepts and cygwin directory tree with Windows directories when cygwin is installed normally with the cywin setup program (and whatever ssh components you install are within cygwin).

I don't understand either the security or the directory tree issues using ssh outside of the cygwin directories.