# rnsh from a Windows client

_Help · started by jlamothe on Tue, Sep 1, 2026 9:40 PM_

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## Original post

**jlamothe** · Tue, Sep 1, 2026 9:40 PM

Has anyone managed to get rnsh working from a Windows client?  It works fine on Debian, but I'm encountering an error when trying to connect from a Windows machine.

Here's my use case:

I'm hosting a custom piece of software for someone.  Currently, he accesses it using PuTTY to SSH into a machine I have running at home and uses it that way.  I want to create a local LoRa mesh in my city, and this is an ideal use case for it as it only requires a very low bandwidth connection.

I've managed to successfully connect to and run the software over rnsh on a Debian machine, but when I installed Reticulum on his Windows 11 computer, rnsh threw an error about a missing module?  Unfortunately, I don't remember exactly what the error was, and I don't have easy access to that machine, but I think it had something to do with termcap?  I wish I could supply more detail.

The network seems to work otherwise.  Has anyone encountered this issue?  Is there a solution?

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## Reply 1

**Zenith** · Tue, Sep 1, 2026 9:53 PM

**jlamothe** wrote:
> I've managed to successfully connect to and run the software over rnsh on a Debian machine, but when I installed Reticulum on his Windows 11 computer, rnsh threw an error about a missing module? Unfortunately, I don't remember exactly what the error was, and I don't have easy access to that machine, but I think it had something to do with termcap? I wish I could supply more detail.
> 
> The network seems to work otherwise. Has anyone encountered this issue? Is there a solution?

Can you post the full error log?

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## Reply 2

**Zenith** · Tue, Sep 1, 2026 10:13 PM

I'll try it on my Win 11 machine and see if I can get it working

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## Reply 3

**Anonymous** · Tue, Sep 1, 2026 10:23 PM

May be the same issue as what was going on with rngit? Windows doesn't allow for multiple processes to access the same file and Resource callbacks send back an open file descriptor. So if a Resource calls back and another open() is done on that same temp file without it closed first, it'll raise an exception. (Haven't looked at how rnsh is implemented, just speculation.)

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## Reply 4

**jlamothe** · Wed, Sep 2, 2026 3:55 PM

It looks like something went wrong with my last reply.  Unfortunately, I don't have easy access to the machine in question.  I'll have to try the next time I'm there and snag the log.  Probably Sunday.

In the meantime, the SSH solution still works, so it's not an *urgent* issue.  It just annoys me.

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## Reply 5

**jlamothe** · Mon, Sep 7, 2026 4:20 PM

Welp, I think I got my answer.  I was over there yesterday and looked at the error message.  Basically, it was complaining about a missing fcntl module, which apparently isn't available on Windows.  Unfortunately, it seems that short of installing WSL (which I was hoping to avoid) I'm just kind of screwed.

It annoys me to no end that Windows is the only major OS on the market that just can't be bothered with POSIX compliance.

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