pihole recently started blocking ecs.office.com. Any idea what's triggering it?
pihole recently started blocking ecs.office.com. Any idea what's triggering it?
As the title says. I'm just curious what's triggering it. There is no MS Office installed. Happens as soon i start a windows10 pc and it's "packed" into svchost. Any idea?
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With MS you never know. They are pretty arrogant and aggressive about assuming you want things running in the background. Something you can try: Install ShutUp10 and look for things like Office Telemetry being turned on. You can switch these things off (permanently or temporarily, your choice) and see if that stops the traffic.
https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10
(There are other ways to do the same thing but I've been using ShutUp10 for years and love it)
Thanks for sharing this. I’ve been trying to explore Linux distros after the windows snapshot announcement but the sheer variety and the hardware troubleshooting has really kept be from making the switch.
Get Win10 LTSC. It gets updates 2x/year, has very minimal bloat.
Then get O&O Shutup to reduce bloat even more.
And you can permanently license it using Microsoft's own scripts.
O&O is good, can also look into privacy.sexy to generate a script with all the stuff you want to rid yourself of. They also have several levels of preconfigured scripts (all open source) that give you a good starting point which you can review and adjust as per your preferences
Nice, thanks for the alternative!
I like the option for scripting it.
Thank you! Do you know if the LTSC version is impacted by the October 2025 sundown date?
"Windows 10 GAC (General Availability Channel) (i.e. Home, Pro) will reach end of support on October 14, 2025. So, if your hardware doesn't support Windows 11 then you might wanna use Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC 2021 since its supported until Jan 13, 2032" from https://massgrave.dev/windows_ltsc_links
Windows 11 LTSC 2024 soon:
No idea.
I've never cared about such things for home systems - I never use MS support, and I think updates are over emphasized for stability and security, as that ignores the other layers that are required.
If a system runs, does what I need it to do, I'm uninterested in making changes that run the risk of causing issues (for example, I have containers for things like Syncthing that don't get auto updates - I need to know that it works the same all the time, as it keeps mobile devices syncing their data to home, which gets backed up). I check updates 2x/year, and manually update if I feel it's useful (sometimes updates aren't available for all systems, which can break things).
All my systems are properly secured, behind multiple layers of security (physical firewall, isolated vlans, VPN, with encryption enabled wherever it's available, etc), I run in limited user accounts, my admin accounts aren't obvious, with proper complex passwords, everything is encrypted, properly replicated and backed up.
My next phase is adding 2FA even for my home servers.
No it's Win that makes debugging and keeping a system clean a pain. Linux is peace of mind compared to MS. Just go with Kubuntu for a desktop-pc (imo).
Glad you found it useful! Love your username.
👍 thanks!
installed OO for years here too and everything switched to green except disable app access to file system, smart-screen and mic...
I'm pretty aggressive about switching things off, too. I will never use OneDrive, for example.
O&O soft is nice, but even better this one to tame Windows
https://github.com/hellzerg/optimizer
From O&O Soft I use sometimes O&O FileDirect, that is a really cool app.