Rackspace Cloud Sites from Command Line Interface is possible to access with limited usage using SFTP Passive Mode even from a Windows PC. Here is how. Rackspace Cloud Sites locks the root access as your IP is just a node and your account is just another user account. Every advanced user wants a CLI for speed of work. This guide shows how Rackspace Cloud Sites from Command Line Interface can be accessed from a Windows PC. It will be easier but same for Mac or Linux. This guide on using Rackspace Cloud Sites from Command Line Interface is not any hack, this the way how your SFTP software with GUI works. We will use SFTP passive mode.
Rackspace Cloud Sites from Command Line Interface : Disclaimer
This guide for accessing Rackspace Cloud Sites from Command Line Interface is intended only for the advanced users. If you have no idea about commands or UNIX, please use a SFTP software with Graphical Interface for your work. We will not be responsible for your careless usage, hacking attempts etc.
Rackspace Cloud Sites from Command Line Interface : Steps and Process
Just follow this guide for a good looking setup for accessing Rackspace Cloud Sites from Command Line Interface.With that package only, you can access Rackspace Cloud Sites from CLI, but we will not recommend it, instead download a small software like PuTTY, named PSFTP from :
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1 | http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html |
It is an exe file, put that psftp.exe file on the same folder as we described on that linked previous tutorial (inside C:Program Files (x86)GnuWin32bin for a normal setup Windows 7 64 bit PC) :

The arrow is shown to indicate the second step. Open Console2. Type :
1 | psftp.exe |
To login, use this format :
1 | open username@I.P.Address |
It will start a session :

Note : For security reasons, we have photoshopped to blur the original username and IP.
Rackspace Cloud Sites from Command Line Interface : Usage
As the graphically heavier interface is not loading, it is quite fast. You will get all the usages on PuTTY’s help doc :
1 | http://tartarus.org/~simon/putty-snapshots/htmldoc/Chapter6.html#psftp |
wget will not work, you can see we have demonstrated on the screen shot. But with php, perl scripting, many works can be done. Simply uploading a php script like we mentioned before and running on browser will basically perform wget and -xzvf more fast than you can actually type. There are many differences between FTP/SFTP and SSH. On a multi tenant single IP configuration, be it crap shared hosting of Hostgator or high end Rackspace Cloud Sites, no one can run a shell command. Then how those control panel works in shared hosting ? Simply they combine the script actions with a GUI. That is main reason why they makes the whole configuration unstable with hundreds of scripts and graphical elements.
In other words, this guide to put (put is a command itself) scripts easily to automate the actions more fast than a SFTP software with GUI is the major focusing point of Rackspace Cloud Sites from Command Line Interface guide.