Earlier quoted context omitted.
I understood you would like an "alternative solution" to dozero trust RDP and SSH "that don't require Windows"
I believe (s)he meant an alternative to the InDesign rendering workflow that runs on Windows.
Yes.
Zero-Trust RDP and SSH Access to VMs on Google Cloud
31–40 of 90 posts
Re: Zero-Trust RDP and SSH Access to VMs on Google Cloud
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
We use remote scripted Indesign instances for creating catalogues, which needs Windows to run, and RDP for debugging. I'd love to hear about alternative solutions that don't require Windows, and still spit out colour-accurate CMYK indesign files; the printing shops won't accept anything else.
The most frustrating, and most fun moments I've had hacking on a computer has been scripting InDesign, so props for that! Most printing shops I've had to treat with will also accept PDFs, is that the case? Because then, there's a case to be made for converting your templates to HTML (gives you access to a huge amount of tooling) and printing them to a PDF through a headless browser instance (like pptr.dev). That has…
Accurate CMYK is the crux here unfortunately; we've got a headless browser PDF setup already working for anything that's fine with "sRGB, probably?" in terms of colour accuracy, but there's a bunch of large companies with stricter requirements (and the budgets for it, thankfully).
(Though browser-based PDF isn't a panacea either. We've got one customer whose 250 page technical manual needs between 40 and 70 minutes to generate through paged.js and Chrome… They're fine with running it as an overnight job, but it's still painful to watch.)
Re: Zero-Trust RDP and SSH Access to VMs on Google Cloud
#33This sounds like a deal breaker for some use cases: https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/iap-desktop/wiki/Trou... "Because of the way IAP Desktop tunnels RDP connections, it always uses NTLM for authentication and can't use Kerberos." There may be environments that lose the security benefits of Kerberos over NTLMv2 (e.g., mutual authentication) because they've been forced into a new compliance mandate that dictates…
Looks like Microsoft's decision to go with increasingly elaborate challenge-response schemes instead of properly encrypting the whole connection (like SSL/SSH) will be haunting us for a while yet. I don't understand why RDP/SMB/... with plaintext auth over SSL hasn't been a thing for at least a decade, does Microsoft just not care about transport security?
Isn’t it plausible that an interactive gui over ssl didn’t perform well specially for VMs or the affect of the renegotiation
Re: Zero-Trust RDP and SSH Access to VMs on Google Cloud
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
Looks like Microsoft's decision to go with increasingly elaborate challenge-response schemes instead of properly encrypting the whole connection (like SSL/SSH) will be haunting us for a while yet. I don't understand why RDP/SMB/... with plaintext auth over SSL hasn't been a thing for at least a decade, does Microsoft just not care about transport security?
Isn’t it plausible that an interactive gui over ssl didn’t perform well specially for VMs or the affect of the renegotiation
RDP over SSH already performs very well, so any in-protocol implementation would only be faster (less overhead).
Re: Zero-Trust RDP and SSH Access to VMs on Google Cloud
#35I'm sorry if this sounds completely ridiculous to some people, but what do people use RDP/Windows server for in 2021? Given that ASP/Dotnet is portable to linux, what are people building that isn't better deployed to linux? It can't just be the legacy use-case, can it?
RDP is pretty easy to explain: if you need a GUI, RDP is infinitely smoother than VNC or anything else the Linux ecosystem has to offer. I even use it on Linux for things like livestreaming (OBS running in a minimal GUI like openbox). The are many similar workloads that are less "servers" and more "cloud workstations" that use GUI apps.
As for Windows in general, 90% of the Windows servers I see fall into one of the 2 categories: 1) they run some Windows-only software or 2) the sysadmins at the company know Windows, so that's what they use. If your company relies on something from 1), you're very likely also going to fall into 2).
Specific example: a company wanted to allow any employee to log in from any computer and be ablr to get work done. A VM terminal server was too heavy for their network and server budget and they already had decently powerful PCs, so they went with AD and that roaming accouts thing. They had to hire a Windows server sysadmin to manage it.
When they decided they also needed a good NAS, web server and backup system, they already had a Windows sysadmin on staff and the licences+over-spec required to run in on Win were still cheaper than hiring another sysadmin.
Re: Zero-Trust RDP and SSH Access to VMs on Google Cloud
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
The most frustrating, and most fun moments I've had hacking on a computer has been scripting InDesign, so props for that! Most printing shops I've had to treat with will also accept PDFs, is that the case? Because then, there's a case to be made for converting your templates to HTML (gives you access to a huge amount of tooling) and printing them to a PDF through a headless browser instance (like pptr.dev). That has…
Accurate CMYK is the crux here unfortunately; we've got a headless browser PDF setup already working for anything that's fine with "sRGB, probably?" in terms of colour accuracy, but there's a bunch of large companies with stricter requirements (and the budgets for it, thankfully). (Though browser-based PDF isn't a panacea either. We've got one customer whose 250 page technical manual needs between 40 and 70 minutes t…
Yeah, I get it, that sucks :/ I do know that PrinceXML has CMYK support so maybe check it out. Else you'd always have FrameMaker and the Server edition if you wanna go that much enterprise-y.
Re: Zero-Trust RDP and SSH Access to VMs on Google Cloud
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
We use remote scripted Indesign instances for creating catalogues, which needs Windows to run, and RDP for debugging. I'd love to hear about alternative solutions that don't require Windows, and still spit out colour-accurate CMYK indesign files; the printing shops won't accept anything else.
The most frustrating, and most fun moments I've had hacking on a computer has been scripting InDesign, so props for that! Most printing shops I've had to treat with will also accept PDFs, is that the case? Because then, there's a case to be made for converting your templates to HTML (gives you access to a huge amount of tooling) and printing them to a PDF through a headless browser instance (like pptr.dev). That has…
The last time I tried something like this, I quickly quit and used LaTeX. For all of its warts, it’s an excellent tool and it runs very quickly compared to a browser.
Re: Zero-Trust RDP and SSH Access to VMs on Google Cloud
#38I didn't know big tech companies were still capable of making GUI's that look like this.
You mean a UI in which all the clickable elements are obvious, features are discoverable, it’s fairly obvious what you’re interacting with, and keyboard navigation works well? I didn’t know big tech companies could still do this either.
Re: Zero-Trust RDP and SSH Access to VMs on Google Cloud
#39I didn't know big tech companies were still capable of making GUI's that look like this.
In my mind that keyboard navigable tree widget is the one redeeming feature of windows. I guess the age of “keyboard first” is long gone :(
Nowadays I'm happy if it even bothers to register all keystrokes. Somehow this has become more difficult now that CPUs are many times faster and don't need to queue all keystrokes to ensure they are taken care of eventually.
Re: Zero-Trust RDP and SSH Access to VMs on Google Cloud
#40I'm sorry if this sounds completely ridiculous to some people, but what do people use RDP/Windows server for in 2021? Given that ASP/Dotnet is portable to linux, what are people building that isn't better deployed to linux? It can't just be the legacy use-case, can it?
I use Windows VMs on Google Cloud to install and play games in the cloud - my Mac can’t play any
Parsec is outstanding for this use case, it’s basically a roll-your-own Stadia. Dunno what its future will be now that it was acquired by Unity