au VS ts_block

I created au framework for chocolatey (Windows OS) and on packages that are cross platform, it made choco above Arch on freshness: https://github.com/majkinetor/au

Having said that, you may want to look into the source code for each package you're interested in. Many of them use the Chocolatey Automatic Package Updater Module, and had to solve this exact problem in some way to help automate updates. I've seen approaches varying from scraping a web page, querying an API, or even downloading the binary and looking at its FileVersionInfo struct.

There are a lot of packages out there where you can customise the install location. If you want to automatically fetch from suppliers and create your own packages then you probably want to look at the automatic package updater with AppVeyor: https://github.com/majkinetor/au/wiki

> I mean, it is a chocolatey, because they allow multiple packaged for the same software.

I think this is more healthy then having one with maintainers refusing to do stuff you may need. The real thing would be for vendors releasing packages but we are far from that in Windows land.

> I meant that packages are often not updated by the maintainers.

Yeah, that was the problem far more before then today. I created AU to solve that issue [1].

[1]: https://github.com/majkinetor/au

> Is there something inherently insecure about remote desktops, or is MS software here known to be particularly insecure...

Exposing RDP to the Internet directly has been frowned-upon because of the attack surface being presented, there's no two factor "story" out-of-the-box, and you're opened up to brute force attempts on cruddy user passwords.

Older versions of the Microsoft Remote Desktop Protocol had a much larger attack surface than current versions. The current versions with Network Level Authentication (starting in Windows Vista/Server 2008) present a smaller attacks surface. Older versions used "homegrown" Microsoft crypto, whereas current versions use TLS.

Disclosure: I made a FLOSS fail2ban-like tool for RDP many years ago[0]. I had a situation where I was forced to expose RDP to the Internet and I didn't like having it open w/o some protection against brute force attacks. This tool happens to still works in Server 2022 and will slow the velocity of brute force attacks. I still highly recommend not exposing RDP directly to the Internet anyway.

(The ts_block tool is missing some fairly essential functionality that I never got around to implementing. It works fine and is really easy to install but some things are sub-optimal.)

[0] https://github.com/EvanAnderson/ts_block

My old ts_block[0] project does something similar to yours, albeit for RDP only and with much less sophisticated customization.

I opted to go with a WMI Event Sink rather than polling the Event Log. I've never done a benchmark to see which architecture would use less CPU, but I can say the WMI event sink causes nearly instantaneous reaction.

As an aside: I'd love to hear if somebody tries ts_block on Windows Server 2022. It works fine on 2012 R2 thru 2019 but I've never tried it on 2022.

[0] https://github.com/EvanAnderson/ts_block

The perspectives in the comments on this article re: WiX XML source and Windows Installer being difficult are interesting to me. Like I said elsewhere, I overcame that learning curve so long ago that I can't put myself in a position where it seems daunting now.

To be fair, though, an MSI to install a 10 files in "C:\Program Files\AppName", register a couple .NET assemblies, create a couple of shortcuts, and throw a few values into the registry would amount to <100 lines of XML.

Here's a years-old WiX 2.0 syntax source file to install 4 files in "C:\Program Files\appname" and run an EXE embedded in the MSI to install a service: https://github.com/EvanAnderson/ts_block/blob/master/MSI/ts_...

I've only seen "thousands of lines" of WiX source when dealing programs that install a ton of files, or put scads of entries in the registry.

Most of the MSIs with WiX are based on a simple skeleton generated from a template, and using "includes" generated by the "candle" tool.

Understanding the Windows Installer and the WiX source feels analogous to what I see in "modern" web development-- a bunch of tools that developers use, seemingly without understanding what they do, to create a massive pile of edifice into which original code is finally placed.