Just to throw another couple of options in, if you're looking at other flavors of Linux, consider Manjaro and Sabayon, they're both rolling release and based on well-known projects (Arch and Gentoo respectively). I havn't tried gaming with either one but thye're both supposed to have support for the closed source drivers out of the box as well as Steam and playsonlinux (wine front end) support.

I was a long-time Linux Mint user (built on Ubuntu's LTS base) but have changed to Manjaro Cinnamon and XFCE (depending on the system's power)

Learning about Dell ImageAssist.... anyone here using it? Pros / cons of it vs MDT?

@Obsolesce said in EXE to MSI Converter:

@notverypunny said in EXE to MSI Converter:

@Obsolesce
Food for thought, and maybe some ammunition for a battle to add Chocolatey to our standard tools, but for the time being I've got the mandate to use existing tools to roll things out, and existing tools means AD infrastructure / GPOs, scripts and all the fun that entails.

Appreciate the options, but does anyone have any recommendations for the exe to msi converter?

DOesn't the .exe have built-in switches to install silently? You could install it via a PowerShell script.

Yeah, it can do silent installs. The part that I find ugly is that (unless there's something that I'm missing, which seems more and more possible as I work through test cases) the script would have to run on every startup (or shutdown) and check for the correct, installed version and either
A - exit if the correct version is installed
B - install if it doesn't find a receiver
C - jump through a bunch of hoops if it finds the wrong version installed (The RTME plugin that we use to optimize SfB has to be managed in tandem with this... it's a royal pita because stuff will seem to install properly but then the user sessions were failing to connect with an "invalid handle" error)

I spent most of the afternoon yesterday going cross-eyed working out the validations, cases and sequencing to try to script things, and it still didn't work as a shut-down script so I'd like to see if the GPO route is any better.

@Obsolesce
Food for thought, and maybe some ammunition for a battle to add Chocolatey to our standard tools, but for the time being I've got the mandate to use existing tools to roll things out, and existing tools means AD infrastructure / GPOs, scripts and all the fun that entails.

Appreciate the options, but does anyone have any recommendations for the exe to msi converter?

@travisdh1 said in EXE to MSI Converter:

@notverypunny said in EXE to MSI Converter:

@scottalanmiller Wondering what solution you ended up going with for this. I'd like to use GPO to push and manage Citrix Receiver but they don't provide an msi. Their solution is either a per-user logon .bat or a per-machine startup .bat

Citrix receiver is in the Chocolaty repository. You could script installing chocolaty and then push a script to install it with choco install -y citrix-receiver

Interesting, thanks for the idea but it looks like they're installing / tracking the CR stream (they're pushing 4.12) and we're looking to install the 4.9 LTSR

@scottalanmiller Wondering what solution you ended up going with for this. I'd like to use GPO to push and manage Citrix Receiver but they don't provide an msi. Their solution is either a per-user logon .bat or a per-machine startup .bat

@scottalanmiller said in Bad one: SonicWALL Remote Management Vulnerability:

@wrx7m said in Bad one: SonicWALL Remote Management Vulnerability:

WTF? People NAT their iDracs?

As opposed to what? Having a disconnected management LAN and only jump boxes to get to them?

I think he was referring to inbound NAT / port forwarding from the internet as opposed to LAN only access

@DustinB3403 said in Bad one: SonicWALL Remote Management Vulnerability:

@wrx7m said in Bad one: SonicWALL Remote Management Vulnerability:

WTF? People NAT their iDracs?

Some people...

Probably the same people that put ketchup on a perfectly good steak..... psychopaths the whole lot of them

@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@notverypunny said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Counting down to a ~550km drive in the new car

Nice, to where?

PEI, going back to the folks place to get the 9yo. He spent a week and a half getting spoiled

@dafyre said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@notverypunny said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Counting down to a ~550km drive in the new car

Road trip!

Exactly It'll give me some time to figure out all of the tech... Just took delivery on a 2019 Mazda 3 Sport GS 6MT yesterday

Counting down to a ~550km drive in the new car

@krisleslie said in Having sluggish performance on my Xen Server VM's, looking for suggestions to boost performance:

@notverypunny See I want to get on the latest and greatest release. I just want to avoid having to nuke everything.

I feel your pain, but in the interests of being able to sleep at night you might be better off moving your stuff and starting from scratch.

In your position I would have created a new virtual disk on the raid controller and added it as a new SR, mainly because I've never considered the option of expanding an existing volume, seems risky without any real benefit that I can see right off the bat.

Getting back into the swing of things after 2 wks vacation. Not enjoying this whole shoes and socks deal, Was really getting used to wearing sandals

@DustinB3403 said in Having sluggish performance on my Xen Server VM's, looking for suggestions to boost performance:

@notverypunny said in Having sluggish performance on my Xen Server VM's, looking for suggestions to boost performance:

The SPECTRE / MELTDOWN patches absolutely killed XS performance for some of our workloads. Ensure that your BIOS and other FW is up to date and consider trying XCP-ng.

Technically those patches killed performance for everyone, not just XenServer.

Fair point. If he's limited to 7.1 for whatever reason it'll be worse, they managed to claw back some of the performance in later releases, but the last patches on 7.1 were deadly. Seems to be worse depending on the specific CPUs from what I was testing on our gear a couple of months back. Our R720s weren't quite rendered useless but it's been a huge factor for new gear for our XenDesktop VDI hosts. The newer procs in the R730s at another site didn't seem to be hit as hard, but it was still significant.

The SPECTRE / MELTDOWN patches absolutely killed XS performance for some of our workloads. Ensure that your BIOS and other FW is up to date and consider trying XCP-ng.

Can you use RADIUS? Was able to get our firewalls to authenticate VPN users against Microsoft's RADIUS implementation and validate against specific security groups in AD.

Working through The Last Ship, currently on season 3

@Obsolesce said in BitTorrent/P2P technology for distributed file transfer of large files?:

@Pete-S said in BitTorrent/P2P technology for distributed file transfer of large files?:

Is it possible to use bittorrent or other P2P technology to transfer large files between a number of servers in different locations? Not file sharing for everyone but as a means of file distribution.

What software is needed? Can the files be secured from unauthorized access?

Dfsr would be easier. Secure and distributed, mesh by default.

I would add the caveat to test first... tried DFSR to sync our primary file-servers and it just wasn't up to the task...

Also have to consider the possibility that the OP isn't running Windows (lucky bugger if that's the case)

So my $0.02:

"Security" is a fleeting and oft misabused idea... The capacity to secure the client's network should be the same for a firewall properly implemented as a VM or as a physical appliance. Off the top of my head, implemented properly means that you're not sharing NIC vswitch or anything else with any other guests and that the hypervisor and host are kept fully patched.

Off the cuff, it's easier to ensure the level of security on a physical firewall or appliance as there are fewer moving parts, as a VM you have to keep on top of updates to the Firewall vm as well as the underlying hypervisor and the physical host. Failing to do so leaves you open to inter-vm snooping attacks using SPECTRE / MELTDOWN and their associated vulnerabilities.

Countdown until vacation starts at 2:30