The following is a suggested list of actions for testing purposes for you to observe the installation of the Server and Client, investigate the software installed and observe StifleR in action. (For details on ”Interactive Mode” please visit the 2Pint Knowledge base and search for “StifleR Troubleshooting using interactive mode”)
Set up the Administrative Security Groups
Install StifleR Service, Dashboards and Beacon servers
Check that WMI and other bits are working
Stop the service
Start it in interactive mode (Testing only)
Check that the firewall ports are open for client connection
Check the Dashboards
Get IIS up and running
Launch your favourite browser and connect to the SifleRDashboard URL
Install StifleR Client
Stop the service
Start in interactive mode
The client should start and connect
Review the client connection
On the server choose option 5 (from Interactive Mode Menu)
Type in the subnet id (Subnet IP address) of the client and hit enter
View the stats
Exit Interactive mode and start the service
Start a BITS job on the client
Switch to the server and see the up to date information
Add another client
Repeat steps 3, 4 and 5
View the server again, see that the StifleR Red Leader is downloading data
Start the dashboard on the overview page
Drill into the subnet to view subnet info
The easiest way is to install the server manually using the MSI. The server supports silent installation if needed, but typically you only need to run the installation on a single occasion, so automation is not usually required.
Pre-Requisites
Requires .NET 4.7.2 to be installed on the server
If you want to use the same server to host the dashboards, install IIS as well
Installation account must have Administrator rights
Ensure you have the License.cab available for the installer to access
Set up the StifleR Administrative Security Groups
Ensure the needed firewall ports are opened
Installation
From an Elevated Command prompt launch StifleR.Installer64.msi.
NOTE: The installer does not check the license file currency or validity. If you select an incorrect license file the installer will continue but the StifleR service may stop soon after starting.
If you need to automate the StifleR Server installation then you could run the following example command line from an elevated command prompt:
msiexec /i StifleR.Installer64.msi CABSOURCE=C:\Temp\License.cab /qn
As access to the StifleR dashboards is limited by Windows Group membership there is a requirement to make some security configuration changes on the StifleR Dashboards website within IIS.
Specifically, we need to remove Anonymous access, and configure Windows Authentication. Then within Windows Authentication, ensure that the only provider that is enabled is NTLM.
You can do this manually within IIS Manager, but the easiest way is to run the following PowerShell snippet:
Check that the service running and is not stopped or in any other state
Manually stop and start the 2Pint Software StifileR Service and ensure that it does so gracefully
Navigate to the StifleR installation directory
Check for the License.nfo files. If this is missing the service may not be licensed properly
Open up the configuration file (StifleR.Service.exe.config ) and check that any expected custom installation values are present other than default
Open up the Windows Event Viewer MMC and check that StifleR Server events are being logged:
Open up wbemtest.exe and connect to the Root\StifleR namespace
Open up the StifleREngine class:
Ensure you can see the WMI methods:
Hit the Instances button:
You should see the default Instance of the StifleREngine with the ID of 1:
Select this Instance. Scroll down in the properties window. Ensure that LicensedVersion is not null and that the other values are similar to those below
If you either did not have IIS installed onto your StifleR server when you installed the Service Component or you are using a separate IIS server, you may need to install the Dashboard Feature on its own.
The Dashboard Feature can be installed manually through the interactive MSI by simply selecting the ”Install StifleR Dashboards (IIS Required)” checkbox at the ”Select Operation Mode and Parameters” step of the installation. Run this on the IIS server that is to host the Dashboards website.
NOTE: Manual installation is not available if run on the Server to which the StifleR Service has already been installed. In this case perform an automatic installation.
WARNING Do not use the ADDLOCAL=DashboardFeature switch. At the time of writing there is no automatic method to uninstall a standalone dashboard installation.
On the IIS Server that is to host the Dashboard website, from an elevated command prompt, run the following command line (Case Sensitive):
msiexec /i StifleR.Installer64.msi CABSOURCE=C:\Temp\License.cab /qn ADDLOCAL=DashboardFeature
Similar to the Dashboard installation. Command Line install (Case Sensitive):
msiexec /i StifleR.Installer64.msi CABSOURCE=C:\Temp\License.cab /qn ADDLOCAL=BeaconFeature
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 4.6.2 must be installed on the client
The client is a .NET 4.6.2 executable with some C++ helper DLLs. It will run on any operating system that is capable of running .NET 4.6.2 . This includes most operating systems from Windows 7 and above with the exceptions of Home and other consumer versions of Windows.
As explained in the ”Planning your StifleR implementation” section, the StifleR Client can be installed in one of two modes;
Windows Service Based Mode – always connected to the StifleR Server, running as a Windows Service - Recommended
Read Only – Reporting only
As a part of the Server installation you may have set up a virtual directory so that the clients can download the rules definition XML from a configured internal URL. If you leave the default setting and the clients will default to use the StifleRulex.xml file which is stored on the 2Pint website. In this case they would require internet access.
In all cases you will still need to configure the UpdateRulesTimerInSec value as this is set to “0” (disabled) by default.
From an elevated command prompt launch the client installation .MSI.
Installation is preferably performed using the MSI file with command line parameters.
For example:
To install the StifleR Client with default settings, in Windows Service Based Mode with a single StifleR server defined , and the URL for the StifleR rules XML download you would run the following command line from an elevated command prompt:
The following table shows the available MSI properties, switches, options and defaults.
For a typical StifleR implementation the order in which you should deploy and configure each component of the system is as follows:-
A successful StifleR deployment relies on a correctly installed and configured Microsoft P2P infrastructure. This is beyond the scope of this document but, as usual, there’s a lot of useful information and links on the 2PintSoftware.com website to help in this regard.
During the installation of the StifleR Server you must enter the name of the several Global Security Groups as shown in the Security Section previous. These groups should be set up prior to installation. The most important at this stage is the Administrators group (“Domain\StifleR Global Admins” by default). Access to StifleR configuration options is limited to members of this group which may be either Local or Domain based and you should have set your main administrator account as a member of this group for post installation administration.
The StifleR client will check through its queue of active downloads (both BITS and DO) and will prioritize them according to a locally held XML configuration file containing a set of rules that are configured centrally by the administrator and automatically distributed to clients.
This file contains a simple rule set that defines the content download jobs and the priority that the administrator has assigned to each job type. See the StifleR rules definition guide for more details on how to create and configure the rules file.
The clients will download the rules definition XML from a configured URL. This URL must be created, and for the purposes of this guide we will assume that it is on the same server as StifleR itself.
Place your customized stiflerulez.xml in a folder on the StifleR server e.g.: C:\ProgramData\2Pint Software\StifleR\Rules
Create a Virtual folder in IIS as follows:-
From an elevated PowerShell prompt, execute the following command:
New-WebVirtualDirectory -Site "Default Web Site" -Name StiflerRules - PhysicalPath “C:\ProgramData\2Pint Software\StifleR\Rules”
This command will create a virtual folder which you will then use during the StifleR client install to configure the clients to automatically update their rules definition. The URL will be:
http://yourserverfqdn/StiflerRules/stiflerulez.xml
NOTE: You must also configure the UpdateRulesTimerInSec value (Client Installation Setting). This is set to “0” (Disabled) by default.
Install StifleR on servers and configure monitoring
Monitor load during StifleR client deployment
Deploy Rules for your environment
Installed onto stable known end points in your data centres
Deploy in stages
Monitor
Plan ongoing configuration
Check that the 2Pint Software StifleR Client Service is Running
Stop and start the Service and check that it does so gracefully without error
Check that the service is generating Event log entries
Check that the StifleR Scheduled task was created correctly.
WARNING: It is possible to set your Delivery Optimization Peer Caching boundaries to match your Microsoft Configuration Manager Boundary Group boundaries. It is important that you do not use this method if you are using StifleR to configure Delivery Optimization and vice versa.
If you are using Windows 10 Delivery Optimization, StifleR can ensure correct Peer to Peer boundaries are respected.
To achieve this, you need to set two parameters per subnet, the DODownloadMode and DOGroupID. These settings mirror the Policy settings for Delivery Optimization on the client systems.
The DOGroupID must be a unique GUID. You can generate a GUID using PowerShell (New-GUID command) or you could copy the GUID of the subnet itself and use that.
If you have multiple subnets within a location, and you want all StifleR clients to share content across those subnets, simply set the same Group ID for all subnets at that location.
For example, in order to configure this capability, you could run the following commands from an elevated command prompt on the StifleR Server:
Once the above parameters are set, the Delivery Optimization clients will only share content with other clients that have the same Group ID.
Note that as the DO group is meant to be well connected and used specifically for P2P file sharing there is no Blue Leader functionality as all members should be local.
PowerShell Snippet
This example loops through all subnets and enables Delivery Optimization Download Mode in ‘Group Mode’ (2)
It then sets the DOGroupID using the GUID for that subnet. This is the most basic configuration and means that DO will only share content with other clients on the same subnet.
To get the best performance from Delivery Optimization, 2Pint recommends that you set the following Policy items.
Max Cache Age (in seconds) – Set this to zero (0) so that content is not removed from the cache once downloaded. The default is only 3 days
Minimum Peer Caching Content File Size (in MB) – Set this to 1 to make sure that all files over 1MB in size will be shared via P2P. The default for this is 50MB or 100MB (depending on Windows 10 version) which excludes a lot of content
These are the minimum settings that we recommend for efficient Delivery Optimization Peer Caching. There are many other DO setting available – see this link for more information
