Administering a PC in a Vacation Rental Home?

mrn121 asks: "Some relatives of mine are preparing their beach house for rental, and they have asked me to assist in setting up some of the on-site technology. One of my ideas was to add a computer with high-speed internet access to the house, but security issues may be overwhelming. I have administered campus computing labs in the past, so I am familiar with locking systems down, but I am curious about what level of security readers might suggest, and how to go about achieving an appropriate balance between security and usability for such an application. On one hand, I don't want renters to clutter the computer with software and useless bookmarks, but on the other hand, I don't want the system to be utterly useless. One major difference between this computer and a lab computer is that I will not have access to the machine for the entire summer, while the house is being rented."

Comments

Don't bother locking it down

[mcgroarty]

I say don't bother to lock it down. They're on vacation -- let them use it however they like. And without physically securing the thing, there's not much you can do about some bored kid's hostile pranks for the next guest. What I'd do is to get one of those cheap $30 IDE removable hard drive kits and a second drive, then use Norton Ghost or even a Linux install with a script using "dd" to make an image of the normal drive's install on the removable drive.

If you make the removable drive have boot priority, you can even make it an automated process, where the vacationers or the rental agent are told they can restore the computer to "fresh state" themselves by sliding the drive in, turning the key, powering up, waiting for it to do the copy, then shutting down, unlocking the drive bay, and putting the drive away again.

Aside from that, set up Windows update to install automatically, use a DSL/cable router box that blocks pretty much everything inbound, and hope for the best.

Re:WWW????

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it is fairly safe to assume that it being a vacation rental, presumably not in a resort community for programmers, that choices #1-5 will be windows 9x+, #6 might be mac OS X, with linux battling it out at #7 with windows 3.1. I am not trying to be all anti-linux here, but this is a vacation setting, you want to keep people as happy and comfortable as possible, not completely shatter some average guy's self perception of computer literacy.

As for protecting what damage the computer can do to the rest of the world, there are also easy OS agnostic solutions you did not realize- mainly a firewall. blocking all outgoing/ingoing ports except port 80 should keep anyone protected. Unless someone needs VPN access to their job, it is reasonable to only restrict them to the web. Yeah if someone knowledgable really wants to get around the system, they can... but who really rents a vacation house when they can go to a library. Its all about being reasonable- He probably has no idea who he is going to be renting to either... There is a threat of an axe murderer renting it and burying bodies in the basement, does that mean you recommend putting video surveilence down there?

Your idea of screening tenants to see what computer background they have is silly. hes renting a vacation house with a computer, not a computer with a vacation house.

It is posts like this that really make me want a (-1, stick up ass) moderation.