I am in the process of setting up a computer system in our church library. One of the first things I thought about in this process is “Locking down the computers”. I decided to observe a local county library’s way of doing the same. The library is just down the street from my home. This is a small library — Only 10 computers linked to their wired network. They have just installed wifi, but I am not going to check it for now. Just want to see how the “protected ” computers are setup.
Observations
- All are running windows XP professional.
- all have sound enabled
- all have usb ports to allow you to save your work ( assuming you have a memory stick of some sort )
- Limited programs are loaded.
- start/run is disabled. no external bat, com or exe files are allowed.
There are some deficiencies noted (so far ) java applications are allowed if accessed through a web page. This means that if you create a web page on a memory stick that has java application within it, you can use your browser to access this application. Voila! An application that you can control.
I have tried the following java application types with good success.
- 1. ssh client
- 2. ftp client
- 3. file browser
None of these cause any harm to their system. I am trying to think of other applications that would be useful if my system at home died. More on this is in a future post.