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Linux Desktop Security for New Users?
theblkadder asks: "Our company is currently undergoing a company-wide transition to Linux on the desktop. While there are numerous excellent guides and tutorials for the admin crowd, I haven't been able to turn up much for the non-technical user. I'm looking for something that would cover such topics as basic desktop do's and don'ts, like 'do choose a non-dictionary password' and 'don't blindly drop to root and install an unverified/unauthenticated RPM that you receive via email,' etc. Anyone seen a guide like this?"
Let me get this straight. You're company is transitioning to Linux on the desktop, but they're leaving administrative policy to the user? Make sure your resume is in order, because you may need it.
Password policy will already be determined by the IT department. Users will never have to worry about unauthenticated packages, because users will never be able to install them. Yada, yada, yada. This is so damned obvious I must be missing something in the question...
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
As long as we're on the topic...
sed s/foo/bar/g < in.txt > in.txt
Whoops! (had a coworker do this just yesterday)
Also, I don't know if any distributions still do this, but I used to have an old version of RedHat that defaulted to aliasing rm to rm -i; ditto for cp and mv. It seems newbie-friendly, but it really just encourages carelessness in the event they find themselves on a different system.
Going to XDMCP seems a bit on the extreme side; moving over to an NIS/NFS (or other more modern or secure systems like Kerberos/LDAP and AFS) and forcing all user files to be written to their home directory which is shared over NFS.
There's enough tools out there (such as cfengine) to handle updating the desktops that, if you have decent desktops, I can't see why you'd want to make them all dumb terminals.
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
Has anyone in here ever recieved a unauthenticated RPM in email?
I have never recieved one personally. It's always nasty window crap I get, and laugh at because I don't run windows.
The only time I get ebuilds are from portage. And from the official websites of programs I am seeking, never in email attachments.
This raises another question though. If linux takes off, will we see a huge influx of linux worms and general crap that are proliferating windows right now?
"When I look back, my life is not a foreign country, it's more like a library book returned long ago." - ????