Enable SSH Access to WSL from a Remote Computer

Setup SSH Server on Windows Subsystems for Linux (Ubuntu) on Windows 11 and Enable SSH Access to WSL from a Remote Computer

I have a collection of computers with Windows on them and I like to play with them. I also want to treat these computers as if they were Linux computers, but after playing with many Linux distros in my life, I came to the conclusion that Linux GUI is really buggy and inconvenient to use. I guess I prefer Windows.

Best of all, I find that Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is a better Linux for a tinkerer like myself. If you tinker with Linux a little too much, it can become unstable and you will need to do a fresh re-install. It is a lot easier to delete the WSL instance and create a new one than to install a whole new operating system.

Since I am a bit too lazy to walk up to those computers to install and configure applications on them, I like to control all of these computers from one computer via a terminal session using a secure protocol, such as SSH.

The tutorial was created to set up OpenSSH Server on WSL (Ubuntu) and enable SSH access into WSL (Ubuntu) from a remote computer. The following tutorial is a bit kludgy. I had planned to do a clean install and configuration of the OpenSSH Server on Windows. By changing the default shell to Bash, I could securely access the WSL from a remote computer. But life is not that simple. Microsoft decided to…