A Windows baseline that can't drift silently

Cylon managed IT fleetIn production

A reviewed, hash-pinned Windows tune-up for every managed desktop, with a weekly check for upstream changes.

The challenge

Business desktops collect telemetry, bloat and background load. Popular community tweak scripts change daily, and running them unreviewed across client machines is a risk.

What we built

  • A weekly check compares the approved settings with the latest community release and opens an issue when anything changes
  • The fleet launcher refuses to run anything whose fingerprint (SHA-256) doesn't match the approved manifest
  • A restore point first, then telemetry, Recall, widgets and background extras off, applied to every user profile
  • Workstations only: servers are skipped automatically
  • Tested in Windows Sandbox, with every change listed in the repo

How it works

Watching and enforcing are kept apart. The weekly checker never touches a desktop, and the launcher never reads the internet's latest version. Changing what runs on the fleet takes a reviewed change to the pinned manifest, which then rolls out through the RMM tool after Patch Tuesday.

  1. Upstream release
  2. Weekly drift check
  3. Human review
  4. Pinned manifest
  5. RMM
  6. Desktops

By the numbers

  • Drift check every Wednesday
  • Fleet run monthly, after Patch Tuesday
  • Open source on GitHub

View on GitHub

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