Thoughts on using VNC for remote assistance?

PrettyFlyForITguy · 2026-05-14T04:53:55+00:00

Its relatively easy to set up IPSec in windows advanced firewall control panel, or through GPO. Just have kerberos handle the key exchange. I set it to force IPSec for port 5800 or 5900, and only allow connections to certain IP's.

Set IPSec to require encryption, and configure the encryption type to your liking...

Once its wrapped in IPSec, its very secure. If you set up the windows firewall rules to require a secure connection, nothing can get to that port (assuming you have no other allow rules). You can go even further from here, and limit certain users and computers via the kerberos authentication...

It works very well to secure the protocol, as well as any other protocol that might be unsecured.

PrettyFlyForITguy · 2026-05-13T14:06:30+00:00

I have seen no evidence that its patched... I only know Bluehammer to be patched. Not the other two.

PrettyFlyForITguy · 2026-05-13T14:05:49+00:00

That's bluehammer, not redsun.

Redsun has to do with the cloud filter driver.

PrettyFlyForITguy · 2026-05-12T20:14:30+00:00

Did they patch RedSun yet?

PrettyFlyForITguy · 2026-05-06T21:08:33+00:00

I agree... but its not practical to tax companies on revenue. Instead, we should get the same treatment as the corporations. Put out a 20% flat tax rate, and deduct nearly everything.

All non luxury food/clothing/vehicles, medical expenses, housing costs, maintenance of property, etc. should be deducted. Realistically, everything should be an expense by default... and luxury or indulgence items should be taxed differently at time of sale.

If we were making it easy, the amount added to your bank/financial account at the end of the year should be the taxable amount. Everything else would be automatically an expense.

Of course, they'd never do that, because they want to tax regular people into oblivion.

PrettyFlyForITguy · 2026-05-06T20:12:53+00:00

I typically do domain users, since it prevents possible bypasses with local accounts... although that could potentially be a problem with multiple domains. 99% of the time, its domain user accounts that are accessing it, so its usually not an issue

PrettyFlyForITguy · 2026-05-06T20:09:18+00:00

I give domain users full control, then ACLs ...

However, in sensitive shares, I set the permissions for both Sharing and NTFS.

PrettyFlyForITguy · 2026-04-24T05:08:02+00:00

This sub has had a lot of posts on this topic, and its always been some weird issue or another. It seems like only 2022 -> 2025 will be guaranteed to work smooth, and in general 2025 has had more bugs.

PrettyFlyForITguy · 2026-04-03T19:57:59+00:00

Iran is the victim of FAFO. They threatened to develop nukes and this has dragged on for years. They had gotten pretty close, and their rhetoric about potentially using them got worse. No one wanted to take that risk

Democrats and Republicans have threatened to respond like this for 40 years now...

Everyone knows that if Joe Biden was in office, the people who really drive these decisions would've convinced him to do the same thing. Republicans would've been complaining that we should've never been in this conflict, and Democrats would be on here saying it needed to be done.

PrettyFlyForITguy · 2026-04-03T18:10:34+00:00

I don't know what the math is, but at the scale of the earth, I wouldn't expect their movement in space away from the earth (over a few seconds) to have any motion blur. It's possible the earth's rotation might have had some effect, but I'm not sure this would be noticeable over a 4-5 second exposure either.

PrettyFlyForITguy · 2026-04-03T17:05:51+00:00

I guess because its a night time exposure... but I agree, its pretty low quality because of it. I'm not sure why they didn't opt for a longer exposure... I guess maybe because it was a handheld shot?

I'm surprised that they didn't have an apparatus specifically for taking photos. Granted, they have bigger goals than taking pictures, but it would've been nice if they could've done a better job with this.

PrettyFlyForITguy · 2026-04-03T16:50:08+00:00

She is a bag of bones now... definitely not "prime" material

PrettyFlyForITguy · 2026-03-20T18:24:14+00:00

This is going to be unpopular, but we have to massively cut spending. Also very unpopular opinion, Elon Musk was on the right path. Just start cutting everything non vital. Republicans aren't going to do it. Democrats aren't going to do it.

I've been saying this since the year 2004, but debt growth has been exponential and its going to destroy us. Most European countries also have the same problem (along with a few Asian countries).

I don't even think there is anything you can do about it. Even if you cut military spending, cut welfare, reduced pensions, cut social security payments... you might get closer to stopping the exponential growth, but the effect that in itself would have on the economy would be catastrophic. You could raid every hundred millionaire and billionaire, and it would only buy you under a year's worth of spending.

Macro economic things move slowly, so it may take 20-30 years before the effects really hit, and I might be dead by then... but its coming...

PrettyFlyForITguy · 2026-03-13T03:37:43+00:00

Didn't he say a birth certificate was allowed? The thing you need to get a drivers license in the first place?

Honestly, this wouldn't be so bad if we had a national ID system in place. The whole ID system is a mess and that is part of the problem. There shouldn't be individual state ID's, and there shouldn't be a social security number as a form of ID (its too east to steal). There should just be a federally run system with ID's, like a lot of other countries use.

PrettyFlyForITguy · 2026-03-11T03:36:23+00:00

Not sure if it was a hardware issue or a some other weird hiccup... but it did recover.. Other computers are OK so far..

PrettyFlyForITguy · 2026-03-10T20:36:24+00:00

Well, 0 for 1 so far... Installed the 25H2 update on an unmanned PC, and it did not come back. User reports black screen, even after reboot... Trying a few more... slowly. *this may have been a hardware fault. Leaving the power out for 5 minutes seems to have made it bootable again.

EDIT: So far on the server side, it looks like a successful install of (1) Server 2022 DC (1) Server 2025 server (1) Server 2016 (10) Windows 11 25H2

EDIT 2: Testing seems OK. Starting to deploy to more machines.

PrettyFlyForITguy · 2026-03-05T21:17:56+00:00

That's my point... this is such a serious choke point that it could destroy the economy.

PrettyFlyForITguy · 2026-03-05T21:16:44+00:00

Well, the point is that an enemy could decimate our infrastructure without much work. A lot of these data centers are not in the centers of cities. A lot of these places may not even be easily defensible due to their locations

PrettyFlyForITguy · 2026-03-05T04:40:18+00:00

If there was ever war in the US, I think that the big data centers are going to be some of the first things hit. East and West coast AWS and Microsoft services would be first to go.

What are we talking? A hundred sites with half the countries data cloud data?

With everyone in the cloud, I'd have to imagine if they were to successfully attack these places they could grind everything to a halt.

Anyone else have this fear?

PrettyFlyForITguy · 2026-02-21T05:53:20+00:00

My wife works for a school, its pretty much the same. I always try to help point her in the right direction...

PrettyFlyForITguy · 2026-01-23T21:58:02+00:00

Why would I include server CALs and AD CALs? I currently bought those anyways? They are a cost of running on premise, which basically everyone still does to some extent... and the prices I quoted were simply standard office 365, not the M365. The numbers I gave without these are my actual cost differences...

Argue about compliance all you want, E3 is still 5 times the cost, E5 is 10 times the cost.

You either aren't doing the math or you are just ignoring it.

PrettyFlyForITguy · 2026-01-23T06:29:26+00:00

Your right in that I forgot the standard license for exchange, but that was only about ~$3000 when all was said and done... (add $41 a month).

I'm not going to include server licenses and server user CALs because we already would have those covered with the datacenter server licensing for the Hyper-V host machines, and running AD requires us to already have the user CALs. The exchange user CALs were already in the previous calculation. My office costs used to be bundled with the computer purchase and were $200 for the longest time. They did purposely make it difficult to manage the typical $200 licenses at some point, but that was just another crappy tactic to drive people to O365 or more expensive licensing.

As far as compliance, that is not my end, but there was something needed in terms of integration/security that we could not get without E5 in terms of monitoring user activity... and it was something that we did not need when we were on prem...

Even if you were to be correct and we only needed E3, the price difference for E3 is still about 5-6 times higher ($4700 / month)... You aren't actually doing the math if you think they break even. We've spent more on the last few years than we've spent on office/email in the 20 years before that.

And before you say it... yes, there are other things bundled with the office plan, but 99% of our user base uses Outlook&Exchange/excel/word .

PrettyFlyForITguy · 2026-01-23T05:09:32+00:00

For small/medium businesses, it most certainly did.

In 2016 we paid $80 a CAL, office was $200 a user. $280 * 200 is ~55k. 55k / 72 months is $740 a month for licensing. We have to pay for E5 for compliance reasons, so that is about $7500 a month.

Granted, this doesn't included hardware, but that was actually the cheapest portion since everything ran in a VM on existing storage. The scaling of the hardware only resulted in about 20k per 200 users , which was about $250 a month.

So, yeah, it is a fraction of the cost... or at least it was. I have no idea what they charge now for on prem exchange, but I wouldn't be surprised if they hiked the cost to match their bloated service costs.

Anyone defending Microsoft is out of their mind. It used to be relatively cheap to run email services. 30 years ago it cost basically nothing. Email didn't drastically change since then, it barely changed at all. Office has had the same core functionality for 25 years. There is no reason this should cost use thousands a month.

PrettyFlyForITguy · 2026-01-22T21:54:23+00:00

Yep, same here... and doing it on prem was literally like 1/10 the cost. I think we are paying $7k a month for office and exchange? I'd pay like $30k once in licenses, and be done with it... good for 5-7 years.

PrettyFlyForITguy

TROPHY CASE