Luke Smashed a Computer 

Dan leaving his camera in the exact same spot it was at when Linus switched inputs made me bust out laughing

Also, having a 'Work Computer' and a 'Home Computer' is very good for focus. I have a Study computer that is basic junker parts and my gaming PC. I built it cause I couldn't use my gaming PC cause I kept distracting myself with habits I have ingrained from using my gaming PC. Such as Social Media, Gaming, Watching films. When I sit at my Study PC, I know it's time to study. I don't check social media. I don't check anything. I zero in on work. Having a Work/Home separation via Desktop/Laptop can be a very good thing for productivity.

I'd really be interested to know what list of hardware is like your "standard" for workstation PC's at LMG.

Luke woke up that morning and chose violence.

Those Asus workstation boards have some remote management features too that are pretty handy for organizations in addition to thunderbolt and 10 gig, so that might be why they got picked? Worth a few extra bucks if it saves many hours of a high paid IT person.

Sometimes it's going to be more wasteful to take the risk with compromised stuff than it is to just destroy the affected item(s) due to the risk of it persisting somewhere unexpected. It depends on what you're dealing with, but malware nowadays can be extremely nasty and affect more than just the OS and external devices. If you have any doubts or concerns about whether it can be fully disinfected, it should probably just be shredded or otherwise destroyed to prevent anyone else from being affected by the item in question.

I found it so funny when Linus tries to speak but Luke just continues talking 7:33

i mean, you could do a video series about thin clients and how if at all that shit has gotten better over time.

An idea from my company is we have dedicated machines plugged in at the office, and then VPN into them with our laptops. Helps a little with that air gap you're referring too, and gives me portability to work in the office, or at home with the full power at my disposal. It doesn't fully solve your problem, but could help with some ideas.

Another problem with thin clients is being tethered to a wifi connection. Eg yesterday, I spent half the day working in a library with a limited internet connection because of life admin reasons, and I couldn't have done that if either a) tied to a desktop or b) using a thin client. If I hadn't had a laptop, I just would have had to take leave yesterday morning, or worked back many more hours because I couldn't have ducked into the local library before and after my dentist appt to keep working

with standardisation... sometimes it's better to have 2 or 3 different options... maybe one for admin work, one for video editors, etc.

This is fun because this entire segment is basically what my job is lol

I remember at school they had remote desktop access set up for us to do work, that required certain software, from home. This was back in like 2006 - 2008 and I remember it worked pretty smoothly. Don't know if it might present usability issues though.

0:27 "Drive C: is fragmented. Scan now to fix it...."

goddamn might as well put it through a shredder

He is breaking everything

My workplace (supermarket) still uses software intended to run on Windows 98 and how slowly everything "chugs" along the hardware may be equally as old.

As IT GRC analyst I love this conversation. This is exactly the type of dramma SME have to think all the time and how this conversation is super complex! If you want a free tip deploy laptops to employees that don't need dedicated GPU or raw power and every 3/4 years change them. If you go for framework laptops the cost might be just an updated MoBo/RAM.

I can't wait to see these LTT video. - How to defrag your SSD. - How to get rid of computer malware.

I'm sorry... but when I'm working I want a big honking monitor and good keyboard and mouse... please no damn laptops. That's torcher.

As someone who is currently working on forcing my company to actually standardize our IT infrastructure, I feel this whole conversation in my bones. We’re a small company in personnel but a pretty big company in revenue and scope of work, so I’ve taken it upon myself (with my boss’s blessing) to spec and build all our machines so that we balance out the machine’s capabilities for the role it’s for and the cost, and making them easy to maintain should something break whilst I’m on vacation, and man, the sheer amount of money we were wasting on both overspec’d and underspec’d machines is truly staggering, as well as we were paying through the nose for those machines from the usual big name OEMs.

For low spec it's hard to imagine a better solution than a mini PC mounted to the back of the monitor with the VESA mount. They're cheap small and quiet, can take 1 or 2 M.2's, a 2.5" HDD, up to 64GB of RAM but 32GB makes more sense, and can have 2.5G NICs, and typically can use up to 4 displays.

Watching this, makes me remember that nobody at LTT is actually a trained IT professional!

You could setup a small vdi environment with one of those standard setups for testing.

Luke: I DON'T NEED THIS A man of integrity. I respect him

The place I work has exactly the opposite workstations specs that you guys use. We use single core 2004 computers to run windows 7 and dual cores from 2006 to run important applications and they run extremely poorly, reducing productivity, but the owners of the company think they are saving a lot of money using super old under specd computers.

Why not burn down the whole building to be sure? That's some "throwing the baby along with the bath-water" stuff.

OKTA and SSO basically solves session hijacks by expiring session tokens every time the browser is closed or at specific time frames.

Now i want to get a full technical analysis of that malware.

Luke Break Bits & Linux Tech Tips

Laptops work really well, as somebody who's been mostly WFH off of a Macbook Pro supplied by work. I then have my Framework for personal computing. That air gap can easily be maintained just by not allowing personal apps on work-provided laptop. Maybe once the Framework 16s come out with their GPUs, they'd be a good option for LMG, given the repairability of the machines making IT provisioning and maintenance easier?

Smashing it is very wasteful. The Linux command " dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/your_ssd status=progress " should fully wipe it. For the malware to persist, it has to overwrite the controller firmware on the SSD as well with something that makes their malware persist, which is also incredibly difficult to craft. Most SSDs verify firmware updates with cryptographic signatures before updating. I would do some research on the specific SSD before grabbing the hammer.

This is why my small company hired out IT to handle machine, server, AWS, etc setup. We don't like them for the AWS stuff anymore due to client timing needs, but for machine management and internal server resources they're fine.

You could have multiple standards for the workstations. You could have the majority using docked company laptops or thin clients. The video editors and engineers can remote into rack mounted workstations. Just wondering what exactly is a thin client I'm just someone who has learned about tech almost exclusively through RU-vid and being on a robotics team.

better title: "Luke Smashed the Infected SSD"

For regular work flow, ie spread sheets, emails, and cloud things, we limit those to the network. Anyone working remotely has to vpn and RDP to their desktop.

15:30 as someone who works in a hospital to wait 3-5 min till the system has bootet while you sit there with the knowledge you have 80 billion other things to do because of Staff shortage is frustrating and generates unnecessary stress

I have a "business PC" I built that ONLY gets turned on to online shop, do online banking and read email, then it gets powered down. It's got an 8th Gen Pentium and an m.2 SSD. It's the perfect Facebook box that will never be contaminated by Facebook.

12:14 Regarding laptop working. I've been using exclusively Dell Precision laptops for my work for the last 6 years now and they've been pretty solid. Every desk in the office has a Dell thunderbolt dock and most people have one for home as well. It's my workplace standard dev spec laptop and it's pretty standard, 32GB Memory, i7-11850H. My previous one was similarly gen equivalent specced and also had touch screen & a Quattro. Honestly, for work I can't imagine going back to using a desktop anymore. My only issue is trying to find a duel display port KVM switch that doesn't cost the moon for home use.

I love Luke's laugh. I don't know why, but it feels genuine.

Thats why the microcontroller based m.2 formatter/cloner thingi is the best. No partition read, just bit by bit operations.

My company has engineering laptops, recently everyone upgraded to Dell Precision machines. Absolutely bonkers how fast they are. They're nice because I have the flexibility to WFH if I want/need to. We use VPNs to access work programs/CAD licenses at home, and then that machine is always work, no personal computer casually clicking sketchy links.

I wasn't even surprised when saw the thumb, i once hammered my GPU for very specific reasons

I’d say VDI only if employees work from home if they don’t have a dedicated work machine that is properly secured according to the company’s security policy

Thin clients...might actually be good on a LAN. I'm pretty sure every instance of a thin client I've used was connecting over WAN and that was _actually_ terrible for obvious reasons.

thin client's can work if properly implemented. Cisco has a good implementation. You would need a dedicated tech though.

whats scary is my work laptop at AMAZON was allowed to upgrade to windows 11 on day 1 with no authorization

Ida nuked it and sold it on eBay “the drive that brought down Linus Tech Tips”

A lot of NVME SSD's have completely unlocked firmware which can be infected. This can reroot your hard drive even after a complete format of it.

These are all teething issues for a medium sized business, and solution for all these exits.

A video on the process of disinfecting a bios/uefi from an infection would be nice to have. I've tried running the installer to overwrite the old image but since the version is the same as the installer, it just cancels pending image instal after restarting to do it. So that would be helpful to know how to do that.

They were laughing but this has all the markings of a public fight with your spouse where you're not trying to draw too much attention to it.

I got the impression that they think thin client always equals shared desktop. You could also do thin clients with dedicated VDI's. So at my last company, they had a Citrix VDI environment and there were two types of VDIs. There were shared VDIs which used a roaming profile where you had access to a browser or could launch a shared XenApp, but it was a shared windows server on the backend. They also had dedicated VDI's where a user had persistent storage and installed applications. And it was literally just a Windows 7 VM (and later 10) that was just for an individual user. They also supported 2FA login and the nice thing about that was I could just use the Citrix Workspace app on my personal machine without having to enroll in any MDM type stuff.

Make sure luke doesnt have a "hook of hamate" fracture

Give the ssd to drive savers, see if they can recover it 😂

You guys need a CISO.... TL;DR: laptop + corporate vpn + corporate anti-virus + corporate firewall + no admin account + highly modified windows image... Managing all of this demands a help desk team + security team

Thanks for badly concluding this clip. 😂

If you have concerns about the motherboard being infected then you should use an external bios programmer.

You should instead ask AV companies around, maybe one of them would analyze what was there, add detection, tell you if it could infect bios etc. And you could make video about what to do after you get infected. But smashing things also works.

As a software engineer we use thin clients to connect to our workstations built for compiling and development, with optionally a workstation GPU if you need it. The downside? It's freaking citrix.

Why not have a standard setup for workstations and a standard setup for business. You could even have 3 levels for in between use cases. You’d have your standardizations but also not overbuilding to the extreme degree.

Give everyone a comms laptop then the people who need it a desktop for power tasks.

My company has struggling desktops and I am begrudgingly speccing out rtx A series cards (Solidworks). I toyed around with speccing a virtual environment and running thin clients instead. I would love to see a video on 'thin clients in 2023' especially from a management & cost perspective

My work (coding) uses virtual desktops and let me tell you, it's pretty okay for coding but I would not want to edit video on one.

Luke just cannot be wrong. It’s not an $800 motherboard!

its come a long way from experience with clients in my school take sub 1 minute to boot

while Formatting might have worked, i feel the catharsis of smashing the MFer is far more worth it

Chief alignment officer 😅

Please do a video on permanently blocking Windows 11.

Why not virtualize Windows like "7 gamers 1 PC" for every person who does not need a high-end workstation, while utilizing one of your "flipped PCs" with $800 motherboard, and other stuff, but with oozes of RAM and multiple SSDs with separate partitions for every user?

Please return this SSD to sumsung for replacement - "doesn't work anymore" :D

I'm building my first machine rn and I can barely afford the $200 board I chose. All I can say is it hurts to hear about $600-800 boards being used, or rather "not" used, in generic office machines lol

If I could edit video I'd cut Luke smashing the drive with the power rangers opening theme where rita pops out and says "after 10 thousand years I'm free"

At my workplace you get the machine you can justify, if you are doing heavy EM simulation you might need two of the highest end GPUs money can buy every generation while people who only use browsers get the shitty dell towers from 2017 IT does not care as the points of failure are more or less the same across the line ... drives or ram, if a CPU dies (as far as i can remember its happened only a few times) you special order one in and swap out the mainboard with whatever you have laying around or give them a spare machine. Shy of a company with 10,000+ machines i don't see a real benefit in only a couple dedicated tiers of machine performance. Give a department the tier of machines they need over the next X years and keep a couple spares of each tier on hand. Also on the subject of laptops, corporate laptop deals typically come with real good support plans, way better than you would get as a consumer often with no questions asked 2 day replacements, however when working from home i had no problem carrying a mid tower workstation to and from work.

I’d really like to see what an attempt at doing thin clients at LMG would entail. It’s clearly not for everyone, but given that you have 10G networking etc. how feasible is it at your scale? What are the major pain points. What kind of infrastructure is required. Can it be done with Proxmox, do you need some pricey VMWare solution etc.

As enterprise IT It's very surprising to me that for people that don't need all the horsepower that lmg Doesn't just get workstations From like dell,hp, lenovo etc

Using an online/web workspace (Like citrix) at home helps to seperate private and work related stuff.

LMG should consider having a standardised work laptop option. You have a work PC, but also a somewhat locked down laptop to access work stuff outside company premises. Along with vpn to connect all work devices, so folks can access remotely their work PCs.

I can speak with experience about using virtualization in a work environment. I work from home as a software developer. I get around 350mbps down and 23ish up at home. My box is a Ryzen 5 5600G with 16GB of ram and no dedicated graphics card. I have two Acer ultrawide monitors each running at 2560x1080. I use an RDP session to remote into a server at the office to work (around 60 miles away) and for the most part experience little to no noticeable lag. If the server's CPU is in heavy use, then things get laggy pretty fast, but otherwise it's smooth enough that I don't normally notice that I'm even working remotely. If I go into the office, where they deployed think clients, the experience is MUCH worse. Very laggy. It's bad enough that when I go into the office for work meetings now, I bring a laptop (Ryzen 5 5600h, 16GB) so I don't have to deal with the lag. The IT guys gave me a knowing nod when they saw my laptop sitting on the desk in front of the thin client lol. So if you go virtual, I'd suggest trying some real computers, but maybe cheaper hardware instead of thin clients.

Talking about VDI, the company that I work for uses mainly non persistant VDI for all its call agents (we do have some persistant) and anyone accessing the secure portions of the network. (being a unix admin, most of my work is done on one of those machines). The only complaint that I have is that they cheeped out and each VM has a very limited amount of recources (2 cores and 4 or 6 GB of ram) and as a result run slow. However I know that they can run way better as I use a VM at home for all my home infrastrture work.

Had a massive project in which we built the physical infrastructure for a fictional company and heavily relied on dell thin clients for a massive price drop off traditional OptiPlex desktops and with the RDP based Dell Thin OS, which I assume all manufacturers have, thin clients seemed provide mostly benefits. No clue on how that worked out in the past however.

how does a tech based channel not have a sysadmin when your company is that large?

Often the manager demands they get the best spec computer even if they don’t need them. Just like they want to have their own parking space next to the entrance of the building to park their overpriced company paid BMW at.

Wrote to you folks repeatedly about a way to do highly available data storage and got absolutely ghosted :) Glad to hear you're finally hearing what HA is.

For those who need it there is a tool called WSUS to make windows updates be controlled by admin. And not just a wild west

I went to a "posh" school a few years ago and we used both Vmware Horizon for most staff and students, but then the media kids had baller pcs, along with the 3D design kids, the music tech dept had studios and teaching rooms with imacs. And even in the VMH environment you had basic vdis (you know word, so light browsing, etc), linux machines for Comp Sci and baller windows machines also for comp sci, and again even baller machines so that kids didn't have to work on the baller machines they could work remotely through a vdi baller machine. It was a mess. And the basic machines were slow, and vmware horizon would sometime freak if you had two monitors, then their was basic GPO problems with roaming. But the good thing was you could roam. If you disconnected (not logged out) a machine and then moved to another machine it would carry over. It reminded me of those Sun Ray Thin clients from the 00's.

VDI has come a long way (at least with VMware), I know companies that use VDI for 3D CAD applications, they use it to reduce the cost of hardware (have better graphics cards in the datacenter but no graphics cards on clients) (at the expanse of more it work), they also provide really good laptops with docking stations so that people can work on them directly for most tasks (mail, web browsing, accounting...) and run the VDI applications (the same way they run other applications, only one application appear in the VDI, not the whole os, so it feels just like a local application), it's also way easier for meetings and work from home because you always use the same machine. My school made a partial switch to thin clients and it feels very smooth, most people don't even realiser they're not even working on the computer in front of them. It allows us students to choose the os and power of the vdi we want on any computer (linux or windows, with good graphics card or not) depending on the work we have to do,we can also access the same VDI from home with a VPN and it feels very smooth if you have a great connection (even in a 3 full HD screens setup). From an IT point of view it allows them to easily manage access to different software and "mount" only the software each student has access to on their session). This can also be used to enforce good practices (like not saving things at a random place on your os drive) because it's reset everytime you reconnect (or you just can't write to it in the first place). Nowadays you also can access your local peripherals so it really feels natural. But doing all that would require 1-2 people full time + the infrastructure. It's worth it on 1500+ companies or on campuses with 5000+ students but maybe not on a small company (even though that would make great content for the Linus IT Tips youtube channel)

VDI actually HAS come a long way. We use Azure Virtual Desktops for a lot of our fully remote folks; you can easily replace that with something VMW Horizon.

Get an email provider that let you turn off email attachments or use plain text.

9:28 good you are admitting it.

long term ai memory cell

I'm enjoying the business meeting.

We have four levels ging from mobile cliënt for more executieve people, UP to thinclients and work from home usb solutions, to hardware low spec and hardware high spec

i think the thin client research and such could make a great series of videos..

It's weird for me to hear you say the editors can't go virtual because their requirements are too high. My experience as a software dev is that I do everything in a remote session precisely because my requirements are too high to work locally.

VM's on thin clients are getting pretty good these days. They still take a bit of time to spin up depending on your resources, but latency is definitely not as unbearable. You also have the flexibility of allocating different resources depending on the job position. Security is a huge win as well keeping everything containerized. Plus you can make a video series out of it which will pay for all of the hardware.

Steamdeck has a dock with 2 Display outputs one HDMI and one DP

you guys should see if its possible to run in a VDI environment!

Fun fact m.2s shread in in good paper spreader

17:07 you can use a VDI for something like an ansys simulation..... Most of the licenses for engineering software are "floating licenses" so your company will have, for example, 5 licenses that are floating but 9 engineers who need access to the program meaning that only 5 people at a time would have access to it. There is a program called OpenLM to help in this and that program will suspend any floating license program.