As the Box IPO shows enterprise cloud file synchronization & sharing (EFSS) is a hot topic. Yet the hottest vendors do not “get” security. Kryha-Chiffriermaschine, Kryha-Encryption Device by Ryan Somma under CCWhat is Cloud EFSS? Everybody knows what a file server is. It stores any kind of document an organization needs to work with. As such its importance is similar to email. A file server’s main characteristics are:

uberAgent is the perfect monitoring and analysis tool for virtualized and physical Windows workloads. In a nutshell, it tells you what is going on and why things are slow. Seeing is Believing There are a number of easy ways to see what uberAgent can do in practice:

Or: Getting rid of Caps Lock & creating the missing context menu key I like my current laptop, a Lenovo W540, but details of the keyboard layout really deteriorate the user experience (not to mention the horrible trackpad - I can only recommend you carry a mouse or buy the successor which is rumored to sport a less terrible design).

Despite its great power, Splunk is relatively static with regards to the data it processes. You cannot instruct it to simply run a script on all endpoints and index the results. The app HK Systems Management changes that. It turns Splunk into a kind of PsExec on steroids.

Using SSL for the entire website should be the norm these days. If you have a decent server it does not significantly reduce page speed and it allegedly even helps your Google ranking. I covered enabling SSL and configuring it so that you get an A ranking in the Qualys test in another post. This article shows how to convert an existing WordPress site from HTTP to HTTPS.

2019-10-01: with the 2019 September update KB4516045 BitLocker uses software instead of hardware encryption by default. Likely reason: the security of software encryption can be controlled by Microsoft. Hardware encryption in the drive may be buggy.

I have always found my blog’s comments a great source of feedback. In many cases, readers have contributed valuable additions to the article content or pointed out errors which I subsequently fixed. However, there is a dark side to enabling others to add content to your side: spam. Here is how I am (successfully) dealing with that threat.

In version 2.1 uberAgent collects detailed ICA, PCoIP, and RDP remoting client properties. Yes, that is right, we have added support for VMware Horizon View to our user experience and application performance monitoring product. Read on for more goodness!

GPU acceleration is en vogue. After slowly but steadily moving out of the 3D niche it has arrived in the mainstream. Today, applications like Microsoft Office leverage the GPU, but even more so do web browsers. Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer all have hardware acceleration turned on by default. People generally seem to be happy about that - GPUs are super-efficient, the more work they do the fewer remains for the CPU, overall energy consumption is reduced and battery life increases. Or so the myth goes. Interestingly, facts to prove that are hard to find. Nobody seems to have measured how GPU acceleration affects CPU usage. Let’s change that.

This is the fifth in a series of articles on folder redirection by Aaron Parker, Helge Klein and Shawn Bass. Part one: How Folder Redirection Impacts UX & Breaks Applications Part two: Visualizing the Impact of Folder Redirection – Logon and Application Launch Part three: Visualizing the Impact of Folder Redirection – Start Menu Search Part four: Measuring the Impact of Folder Redirection – User Logon Part five: this article Previously on this Series If you have been following this mini-series you know that after explaining the basics in part one we got to the juicy bits in parts two and three, where we presented videos that vividly show that folder redirection indeed speeds up user logons considerably, but at the price of potentially horrible user experience during the session. In part four Aaron Parker published our measurements of how folder redirection affects logon duration. This fifth part is about the effect folder redirection and SMB version can have on application launch speed.

This is the third in a series of articles on folder redirection by Aaron Parker, Helge Klein and Shawn Bass. Part one: How Folder Redirection Impacts UX & Breaks Applications Part two: Visualizing the Impact of Folder Redirection – Logon and Application Launch Part three: this article Part four: Measuring the Impact of Folder Redirection – User Logon Previously on this Series If you have been following this mini-series you know that after explaining the basics in part one we got to the juicy bits in part two, where Aaron Parker presented videos that vividly show that folder redirection indeed speeds up user logons considerably, but at the price of potentially horrible user experience during the session. In this third part we are going to explore that in more detail.

My recent post about things I dislike about PowerShell provoked some interesting reactions (see the comments). Several readers argued that PowerShell is not supposed to be a full-blown programming language but a kind of super-advanced shell scripting tool.

With all the love PowerShell is getting these days one might think that the golden age of (Windows) scripting has finally begun. Maybe it has. But one man’s nirvana can be another man’s hell.

This is the first in a series of articles on folder redirection by Aaron Parker, Helge Klein and Shawn Bass. Part one: this article Part two: Visualizing the Impact of Folder Redirection – Logon and Application Launch Part three: Visualizing the Impact of Folder Redirection – Start Menu Search Part four: Measuring the Impact of Folder Redirection – User Logon Why Even Talk About Folder Redirection - in 2014!?! Working in the SBC/VDI space without stumbling across folder redirection is about as easy as travelling from Europe to the US as an IP packet without going through a Cisco router.

If you install the Citrix XenDesktop 7.6 Virtual Desktop Agent (VDA) on a small Windows 7 VM, you may be in for a big surprise, and not a good one. This article documents issues I have experienced and how to work around them.

Last updated: 2017-01-21. This article still applies to the latest versions of GoToMeeting. The high disk space usage has not been solved yet. Am I running the latest version of GoToMeeting? Which is the latest version, anyway? Those trivial questions might not be easy to answer.

I am more than happy to announce that I won a Splunk’s Revolution Award in the category developers. The winners were presented on the big screen during the keynote. My slide reads:

Virtual hard disks have the same tendency to grow in size as regular disks have to fill up. Deduplication is a great way to battle this, but unfortunately it is not available for Windows 8 Client Hyper-V. I know that hacks are available describing how to transfer the relevant DLLs from Server 2012 but I value my data too much to try that. The only thing left in order to regain valuable (SSD) disk space is to compact the VHDX. That, however, is more difficult than it should be.

In the past years I have attended many different conferences and user group meetings. Apart from the fact that every single one of them was great and definitely worth the while they all had another thing in common: getting there involved a significant amount of travel, in most cases to other countries or even continents. Whenever I read someone’s account of a local community meeting I was a tiny little bit envious that they had such things near their homes and I did not. High time to do something about it!

The most important change in version 2.0 of uberAgent is the new architecture. In addition to that we have made many other improvements, significantly reducing the agent’s footprint while increasing the quality of the collected data.

Creating an installer that does not suck is hard. The tools available are expensive, inadequate, overly complicated and/or poorly documented (pick any combination). WiX is one of the better choices. It is free and it is used for some Microsoft products. But WiX is just a wrapper around MSI and as such is unnecessarily difficult to use. In an effort to make life better for fellow developers I am publishing the full source code of uberAgent’s installer here.

You have probably heard of Splunk, but can you describe what it does to a colleague in a few sentences? That is not easy. Splunk does not belong in any traditional category but stands apart from the crowd. That makes it interesting, but also the explaining harder. Here is my attempt.

Note: The installation described in this article worked very well for me. However, nine years after publishing this post I replaced this setup with a more modern dockerized installation that is easier to maintain. PHP upgrades, especially, are a lot simpler.

There are many possible reasons for wanting a fast server well connected to the internet. Some may want to move their lab from their powerful but heavy laptop to the cloud so they only need to carry around a lightweight ultrabook. Others may want to set up a demonstration system for their software or solutions portfolio. I primarily wanted a fast webserver.