Supported Clients
Hardware
If the client hardware can run Windows, it can run the StifleR Client. CPU & Memory utilization is very low.
Software Requirements
Pre-requisite
Windows 7 SP1 or later
Supported are x86 or x64 versions of the operating systems
Professional, Enterprise or Ultimate versions
Newer Educational SKU is also supported
Microsoft .NET 4.7.2 must be installed on the client
The client is a .NET 4.7.2 executable with some C++ helper DLLs. It will run on any operating system that is capable of running .NET 4.7.2 and BranchCache. This includes most operating systems from Windows 7 and above with the exceptions of Home and other consumer versions of Windows.
Hotfixes for Windows 7 - BITS might ignore the throttling policy and consume the WAN circuits in Windows 7 SP1 or Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 (not required but fixes a bug within BITS that can cause it to ignore Bandwidth Policy)
Mode of Operation
The StifleR Client can be installed in one of three modes:
Windows Service Based Mode – always connected to the StifleR Server, running as a Windows Service
Event Triggered Mode – only starts & connects when a download job is created and running
Read Only Mode
Windows Service Based Mode
The benefit of Service Mode is that the Administrator can send configuration changes to the Client immediately at any time. This does not happen in the Event Driven mode as the client is only active when a download job is run and the client will only receive configuration changes at start up.
When running as a service, the StifleR client runs as a Windows Service and monitors job creation every few seconds according to the configured interval.
Event Triggered Mode (Advanced Only)
The client is not always running in this mode lowering utilization on both client and server. This however means that the server cannot reliably perform certain configuration tasks on the client in real time.
When the StifleR client is event driven it is triggered by the Windows ETW (Event Tracking for Windows) system using a Scheduled Task that launches the StifleR Client on BITS Event ID 3 (BITS Job created). Once all queued BITS jobs have completed, the Client exits out.
The reason that Event Driven mode was first written into the product was to cater for a situation where a customer may deploy your content in ’Maintenance Windows’ within set times during offpeak hours for instance and may not want the service running outside these hours. We have not seen any requirement for this in real world usage and accordingly this mode should be considered for advanced use only.
Read Only Mode
This mode requires separate licensing. It is a limited version only for network monitoring and dashboard visibility.
StifleR Client on Windows Server
The StifleR client can be run on a Windows Server system where, for example, you may want to monitor the Bandwidth performance of an SCCM Pull Distribution Point. In order to do this you must edit the following line into the StifleR.ClientApp.exe.config file and restart the StifleR service:
Once the Service has been restarted, the server can be monitored like any other client. NB: It will not appear in the ‘Servers’ dashboard.
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