[Kde-kiosk] Corporate Desktop

[Stephen Brown]

On Wed, 15 Sep 2004, Daniel Bertolo wrote:

> - OT: Is there an opensource solution for deploying and managing all the linux
> workstations? So far, I just know ZENworks Linux Management. But that is not
> really a bargain.

The learning curve is steep, but we use GNU's cfengine for configuring
the teaching lab computers here at UMBC.  There are a lot of features
in cfengine that we don't use -- basically, we do a stock install on the
machines (errr.. with a "few" changes using RedHat's kickstart feature,
so they can see our AFS cell) then run cfengine from the kickstart
post-install scripts to make all the changes set up in a central set of
files.  Since we have CS students with physical access to the machines,
they have only one entry in crontab -- to run cfengine every 15 minutes
which resets any changes the students may have managed to do (say, with
a root-kit).

Steve Brown
sbrown7 at umbc.edu