 Tom here from LearnSystems and we have been a long time user of the remote access tool ScreenConnect. It has been great and I still call it ScreenConnect, which is actually still based somewhere in its name. Its official product name is ConnectWise Control. We were using it and bought our on-premise self-hosted version of it long before it was bought by ConnectWise and you know, they've honored the license and the on-prem version upgrade processes over the years and it's been great. But the thing that hasn't been great is the Linux support and what they finally have done is forced me to move this to a self-hosted Windows server. I'm doing this video because I've talked a lot about the product and it's still a core product we'll use. Yes, I'm aware because we're SolarWinds is primarily what we're using here in November of 2020 for all of our MSP work and they do have their own connection tool. This is used mostly for our one-offs and ScreenConnect is great for having a one-off connection and a lot of unmanaged clients that are not part of our MSP stack. Everything in our MSP stack does go with the SolarWinds remote connection tool. This is for the non-contract, but we need access to a lot of systems and what we've run into is what you're kind of seeing right here. So this is November 23rd of 2020 and we can see that we have a pre-release update for ScreenConnect 20.13 for Windows, 11.9, but 8.2 is the last even unstable version that they have for Linux. Their stable version was from 7.27 and still I would still not call it stable and that is where the problem lies. We have had a lot of problems with it. Basically it runs out of memory and starts ramping up CPU usage. Occasionally we just got to reboot the server a couple times till it works. It's buggy and this is why I'm going to be not recommending anyone run this on Linux anymore. We finally got fed up with it. Now if you're not experiencing problems, good for you and the reason may be because of how many units you have attached to it. I talked to someone that says they only use it for a handful of computers, that's great. We have learned once you exceed about six or seven hundred computers, it is really just not designed to handle it. That's as much as I can get the team over at Connectorize Control to admit to that if you have that many machines or more, you're going to have problems running this on Linux and that is exactly the problem we're experiencing. Their suggestion is to switch to Windows. When you ask them the question though of, are you going to continue supporting Linux? You don't get an exact answer but I think the writing is on the wall. Now the hosted system they have itself and this is where I did my review where you host it at ScreenConnect.com and buy it as a software as a service model. They do all the hosting updates and everything else and they do run Windows on their back end. So I understand why they're not running Linux because they don't want to take the time to maintain a Linux version for people like me and it's something they're not even using on the back end. Now what I did want to talk about is since I moved and since I had recommended setting a proxy up in front of this, that process and how that went pretty straightforward is actually really easy to do and they have a write up here easy to find on how to move from OSX or Linux to Windows. Both configurations are the same and pay attention particularly to this part right here where it says just copy what's in the web config for the app settings and make sure that you have your symmetric key which is part of the encryption key. Now the reverse proxy settings, the only thing I really had to change was to make sure that the web server adjustable URL was pointed at my proxy. Now previously I had done this using Linux in a reverse proxy so it was all on one machine and that's very convenient and the reason you need a proxy is because the certificate process is clunky inside of Screen Connect and not automated. The automation comes from using a tool like Let's Encrypt. I don't know why they chose not to natively build this in but hey they did not. This was the opportunity was building a proxy in front of it, setting up an automated Let's Encrypt cert and away you go because the only two ports needed for Screen Connect is 8040 and 8041. Now 8040 is the web interface. This is the one you have to forward over to HA Proxy. The other 8041 is just a port forward in your firewall. This is very important that you don't try to proxy both of them because 8041 already has its own TLS level encryption. The part that's not encrypted is the web interface itself natively but you can modify it and buy a certificate and install it and every year you have to buy another certificate and install it each year or you can put a reverse proxy that has Let's Encrypt certs that auto-renew. Now I'm using PF Sense with HA Proxy. I can leave a link to the video I have on that and it's really no different setting it up for Screen Connect than it is for well any other service. I moved the port that I wanted it on on the HA Proxy side but then when you connect HA Proxy to the back end you just connect it to port 8040 and as I said with 8041 because that's the actual control stream port you just port forward that one. So overall the process was relatively simple getting it set up. We loaded a Windows server, loaded Screen Connect, copied it based on the migration settings and the way we went. We are now hosted on Linux. Admittedly it is a lot faster. It is running on the same virtual machine stack that our Linux one was and watching the processor look almost flat is amazing and it opens faster, it works faster so yes. It's not that I am saying Windows is faster. It is the mono that they built it on top of that is the real issue I believe. I'm not a programmer I did not write this software so I'm not 100% certain but if you start digging around you'll find people complaining about mono eating too much memory in Linux and you can see this is actually on the Connectwise post about this. This is from a few years ago but the problem still persists and it's still something we were seeing. So for those of you interested or those of you that I helped in the past to this and you followed my guides, followed scripts we put out there if you're experiencing issues and you want to move off of there one, moving all the clients in the computers really straight forward they connected right away once we followed the migration they didn't have any problems moving. The license itself for those wondering and I confirmed this with Screen Connect and of course they can confirm it because I've done it now the license is the same so if you already have an on-prem license the on-prem license works the same for the Windows version as it did for Linux. It was overall pain-free. The only thing that really pains me is now that I have to run a Windows in my stack is well I guess I'll have to live with that. I still like the product. I still think it's a good product. I plan to continue using it. Matter of fact my license renewal was up and I bought it for another year so that has remained unchanged as far as my usage of it. It's still a great tool. I still like it. I dislike that it runs on a Windows server now but it still works on my Linux laptop or my Linux desktop to connect to other computers. That part remains unchanged. Matter of fact it's gotten better because now we have a new version of there and I'm hoping to get some new updates for the client side that works in there but overall like I said I've got reviews if you want to dive deeper into the tool you can look at their self-hosted one. We still have for our one-off we still have at least one instance we keep up and running of their self-hosted sometimes we do this for comparison and testing and when people can't get around certain problems if we use ours versus theirs I'd like to do some comparisons of them see if there's any difference but now that we're actually using the latest version of Screen Connect locally because we can now that running Windows it seems to be on pair with the hosted instance that you can get from them. Now whichever one you want to buy by the way I am not a reseller I have no affiliate links I have no association with Screen Connect I am a paid user as an IPay for the privilege of using this software and there's no affiliation I have directly with ConnectWise over this matter of fact I kind of wish I had some inside information because I held on probably longer than I should dealing with the problems and having to restart the server to get it functioning again in Linux with the hope that they would come up with a new version of Linux but that hope is now gone and I have to get work done so I finally moved over to Windows this is all my little rant on it and yes it works with HAProxy and I tweeted about this this is just a follow-up video kind of over this topic and a reply for people asking do you still run Screen Connect and do you still self-host it? 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