#cygWINNING! [Moved]

I've got to say, one of the coolest things about working here at Red Hat has been FINALLY getting a corporate-supplied desktop that runs a non-proprietary operating system.  Having worked in large companies for years now, one of the largest complaints my teams have had is the productivity loss not having native *NIX tools at their fingertips (scripters and developers especially).  It's very powerful to be able to accurately model and test something right on your desktop.

So most of us have to deal with alternate methods of mocking up Linux.  Perhaps you use a virtual machine or you dual-boot, but more likely you're using an SSH-client to hop over to some *NIX box you've got rights to so you can do your thing.  One cool alternative is a tool called Cygwin.  It offers a full standard UNIX/Linux shell environment right on your desktop.  It runs on lots of flavours of Windows, so it might be just the fit you need to get your job done more quickly and efficiently if you can "go native". 

I've used Cygwin off an on for years, it's been pretty nice.  One problem has been the lack of management and upkeep to it (IE- unlike most modern OSes that have self-updating capabilities baked in now, with Cygwin it's all manual) so it quite often lagged behind on updates and bugfixes since I was too lazy or too busy to update it.  So one cool solution I recently found out about was that Red Hat offers up support for Cygwin and can provide consistent updates.  It's cool that many people might never need that extra hand, but for those that do we can certainly help you out.  Details can be found here for those so interested:

http://www.redhat.com/services/custom/cygwin/

So my question to you all:  Have you used Cygwin in managing your *NIX?  Was it useful to have a shell at your fingertips whenever you needed it?  If you don't use Cygwin, what are some other good tools to help with connectivity and management (Lot's of folks use Putty or SecureSSH)?  We'd love to hear from you!