I've been looking at automating tasks involving remote machines. As such I need a way of transferring files between machines and executing commands on remote machines. Secure Shell (SSH) is very nice, but a bit messy to set up in a heterogenous environment with both Posix-like and Microsoft platforms. It would be nice be able to simply start a server process on the remote machine that would accept secure, authenticated commands, without the need of an involved installation or requiring Secure Socket Layer (SSL) certificates.

I think paramiko is what I have been looking for.