[Discuss] how to manage a bunch of ms boxes?

[omegahalo at gmail.com (Chris O'Connell)]

If the users were half-intelligent you may want to train them to use a
sandboxing software like SandieBox, which is very effective at eliminating
user induced problems.

I think there is a program called Deep Freeze or something that sets a
computer back to locked state after a reboot.  That may be an option also.

Lastly, if you run Windows 7 Enterprise or Ultimate the OS can be configured
to boot of from a VHD file.  You can keep just one VHD file on a network
share and download it to replace the VHD the students/teachers/whomever
messed up.

Sorry, I can't think of any sure-fire solutions that involve Linux.


On Sun, Oct 16, 2011 at 2:58 PM, Bill Bogstad <bogstad at pobox.com> wrote:

> On Sun, Oct 16, 2011 at 10:25 AM, Eric Chadbourne
> <eric.chadbourne at gmail.com> wrote:
> > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> > Hash: SHA1
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> > Hi All,
> >
> > I have a public computer lab with a little under 40 windows PCs.
>
> What version of Windows?  I've heard of Windows only solutions that
> don't involve virtualization where this would matter.
>
> > Here's what I'm currently thinking of doing.  Install Ubuntu and
> > virtualbox on all of them.  Upon automatic login a shell script starts
> > that checks for the latest windows image.  If the PC already has the
> > latest image then start virtualbox in full screen mode else download
> > image and then start vb.  This way every user has the same exact
> > 'computer'.  It will make my life and the teachers lives easier.
>
> If the machines have the disk space for it, why not keep two copies of
> the windows image  locally (master and working)?   Do a local copy of
> master to working on every restart.  This should reduce the time it
> takes to boot the systems up (and not pound the network at the start
> of class when every machine gets restarted after the gold image gets
> changed).  When you decide to change your gold system image, you can
> do a one time copy of the gold image to become the new master on all
> of the machines.  Also, It's not clear to me if you were planning on
> using the ability of VirtualBox to do immutable images.   That
> wouldn't require having to reserve enough space for two local image
> copies and will guarantee NO changes made by the user remain after
> they logout as well as even faster logins.  You would still push gold
> images to the client machines at your leisure rather then having it
> happen during class.
>
> If you plan to do networking within the Windows systems (not just the
> host Linux OS), you have to consider whether the Windows systems have
> to have different names/IP addresses.  If you stick with using VB's
> builtin NAT, you should be okay for web browsing, but if you plan to
> do Windows' filesharing
> you could have a problem.   If you allow printing, you might want to
> set up CUPS queues on each Linux system and have your Windows images
> print to
> that locally.  CUPS can then forward print jobs on anyway you want.
>
> If you currently allow people to use their own media (USB flash
> drives, CDs (for data, music, recordable to backup files), you will
> have to figure out how to do this with VB.  Unfortunately, I don't
> know how I would approach that issue; but I suspect it is doable.
> Personally, I would do a lot of google searches.  I'm sure you aren't
> the first person to attempt this using VB.   Other peripherals such as
> USB scanners, headphones, cameras, etc. are likely to be even more
> difficult.
> I've personally run into situations where VB's graphics driver doesn't
> work well with some Internet streaming software with some versions of
> Windows.  (This may have been fixed.)  Whether using VB for this is
> feasible at all is going to depend on just what you need/want to
> support.
>
> Good Luck,
> Bill Bogstad
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