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Locking Down Linux Desktops In an Enterprise?
supermehra writes "How do you move 300 desktops, locked down with Windows ADS Group Policies (GPO), over to Ubuntu desktop? We have tried Centrify, Likewise, Gnome Gconf, and the like. Of course, we evaluated SuSe Desktop Enterprise and RedHat Desktop. Samba 4.0 promises the server side, however nothing for desktop lockdown. And while gnome gconf does offer promise, no real tools for remotely managing 300 desktops running gnome + gconf exist. All the options listed above are expensive, in fact so expensive that it's cheaper to leave M$ on! So while we've figured out the Office suite, email client, browser, VPN, drawing tools, and pretty much everything else, there seems to be no reasonable, open source alternative to locking down Linux terminals to comply with company policies. We're not looking for kiosk mode — we're looking for IT policy enforcement across the enterprise. Any ideas ladies & gentlemen?"
Use puppet to enforce configuration: http://reductivelabs.com/products/puppet/
Issue everyone Mittens!!!! They are relatively cheap and make it oh so hard to type terminal commands when worn.
Why not use LSTP? That way you only have to worry about whatever image(s) you keep on the server.
so expensive that it's cheaper to leave M$ on!
If you want to be taken seriously, please lern 2 spel currektly. I'm not a Microsoft fan, but it sure is annoying seeing it spelt like that.
if you are talking stand alone desktops then it's not so great. linux doesn't really have anything as good as group polices and active directory, it's part of the reason corperate networks are mostly windows.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
I guess the first question is: what are you trying to accomplish? Are you trying to prevent users from installing additional software locally? Are you trying to insure that particular applications get particular preferences set and users are prevented from changing those settings? What? Just saying "lock down the desktops" doesn't say what you're trying to actually do.
Remember that Unix is, in large part, designed to work correctly without needing to be locked down. Much is controlled simply by the system-wide configuration files. The rest tends to be controlled on the server side, so that users simply can't do unacceptable things regardless of how they configure their local user account.
In linux world, there is yet to be a quick, 3 question and 1 button way to add the computer to a domain and then receive straight away:
- group policies - security and software install
- single password store (with cached passwords for notebooks that go away from the network)
- Patch update policy
The only thing linux does right is work on technologies such as DHCP that were written for OTHER unix O/S'.
Ubuntu is not interested in those things, they're more interested in making stories about koalas and hiding popup boxes.
Gnome is dead, Mono and moonlight took all their brains away.
kde is making a next-gen desktop but have yet to understand why so many IT shops have kept Windows at the office.
This is all depressing. Windoze will never be replaced at the current rate.
A desktop where the user does not have su/sudo access is already pretty locked down -- the user can only write to his home directory and other directories that he/she has access to through normal permissions.
If you really want to lock it down, the user's home directory can be mounted in such a way that files cannot be executed from there.
What elso is required?
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Instead of spending $$$ on bondage and discipline, how about treating your users like adult human beings?
Because a number of them will wind up installing aps that put the company at risk?
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
SELinux is not what he's looking for.
If you just manage the users properly and NFS mount applications it almost takes care of its self and don't need an extra layer of complexity.
use PXE+XDMCP and the workstations be come irrelevant
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I remember an article about KDE's long term strategy to be just that: an enterprise ready Desktop with fine grained policies, central administration and all the fluff that makes windows enterprise-ready and the de facto standard for the desktop.
IToday, we have a colorful disaster that isn't even as usable as its predecessor. Developers should have focused on the need for an enterprise desktop that could actually make a dent in MS corporate sales. Instead we got useless eye candy.
The fault, of course, lies with the big distributions that pride themselves on providing enterprise ready Linux. Enterprise sans le Desktop. Useless wanking. The requirements for an enterprise ready desktop are out there for anyone to see and it's not just "applications" as everyone usually points out. It's the ability for administrators to create and maintain a usable desktop according to official corporate policies. No more and no less.
locking down Linux terminals to comply with company policies
Sooo, what exactly ARE these company policies?
You know, as much as I agree with you, I wish it were not so.
More and more things are getting tied to a computer. Back in the early 1990s, a computer was generally used for number crunching and document managing. People (generally) did not use a computer to listen to music, watch a movie, meet people, or to stay in touch with one's friends.
Now people are using computers for all of these functions. It's important that things we need for daily living in the 21st century are not controlled by a single corporation with a known pattern of abusive behavior. Microsoft's latest abusive behavior--suing TomTom for having FAT32 support on their device--shows that the only thing stopping Microsoft from abusing their monopoly are antitrust laws and community activism.
This is why Linux needs to fix the issues that make Linux not a suitable desktop for end users, or why one of the other possible open-source desktop OSes (Haiku, Syllable, etc.) needs to become a suitable end-user desktop.
I use Windows right now instead of Linux because I don't feel Linux is ready for the desktop, but most of my partitions for "extra data" are formatted using the second extended filesystem (Linux's "base" stand file system) and read in Windows using ext2fsd because I don't want my data to be held hostage by Microsoft patents.
So, yes, I really want Linux to succeed.
- Sam
Ya, NO linux based company would EVER do something like that.
www.redhat.com
What's Ubuntu's LTS support? 5 years? And how long has XP been supported? Right...
Mod parent UP. The OP is thinking about it wrong: ie how to manage unix in the style of windows. Don't give them root and they can't install software. Make sure the home directories an /tmp is moutes -noexec and there is NO WAY that they can run programs which aren't already installed.
Now they can have free run of the system and can't do anything harmful. Still not satisfied? Remove all executables that they shouldn't run, or make them a-rx g-rx, and don't have users in the group able to run them.
You can create an RPM to do this for you, then set up the whole thing automagically using Redhat's or SUSE's tools (one is called kickstart). I suspect it is straightforward on debian based systems, too.
If you have the autoupdater running (good for security), then update the setup RPM, put it in your local repository, and sit back as all the desktops get updated with new settings.
Alternatively, you can bodge it with shell scripts and a cron job :-)
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Probably because you can't guarantee that the users will ACT like adult human beings.
Any corporate policy that relies on "Let's just hope users don't do bad things" is doomed to fail.
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You feel Linux isn't ready for the desktop, or Linux isn't ready for your desktop?
http://sourcemage.org/ - Have fun
You can't install apps without root.
You can't get root without proving your competence and signing an agreement that says you will only install apps that have been approved.
It changes from being a "lockdown the desktop" problem, to an "unlock the desktop for people who absolutely need it, and closely monitor their activities" problem.
You think using technology to help enforce an IT policy and respecting your employees are mutually exclusive aims? I strongly disagree.
A small contingent of 'bad apples' can do serious harm if you do not effectively enforce IT policies. It's not possible to guarantee there is no one like this in your company, so you should protect the company and other staff from from them.
Respecting staff won't stop douchebags being douchebags and screwing up your systems.
Paws... Then they could have Caps Paws...
But, if Puppet offers tiered services, then you can evaluate the... Puppet Tiers (LOL)... Then controlling the employees simply becomes a matter of ... pulling strings...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Unfortunately, few people in the Unix world seem to grasp what Group Policy is used for in Windows.
It's not simply preventing users from installing software.
Group policy is a set of policies that gevern everything from security policies, to application policies (for instance, say you want all users in a specific AD OU to use a specific proxy server, or maybe you want to limit all computers in a given lab from being able to use an MSN Messenger.
GP can be assigned to specific computers, groups of computers, users, groups of users, and a whole host of situations. The nice thing about it is that it's AD wide, and controls the user or the computer regardless of where, or what may be installed on the machine or how it's configured locally.
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
Doesn't work:
bash-3.2$ less douchebaggery
douchebaggery: No such file or directory
bash-3.2$
Or, am I missing something?
Yeah managing this for 300+ people in an environment that changes daily without spending your entire IT budget on admins and the sneakernet support staff.
despite our desire to act like open source is the cure for all ills this is the type of problem we need to solve. You MUST lock down some enterprise environments (or have a CEO who is willing to go to jail) and you MUST be able to manage this without breaking the company piggy bank. He's asking for solutions to these two requirements not how to keep ONE person on ONE desktop from doing ONE of the many forbidden things.
And as for the guy/gal who suggested we treat everyone nice and hope they act right. That's fine for your 10 person IT shop...not so much for a multi-billion dollar public company that needs public trust and investment and is governed by a whole mess of federal regulations in numerous national jurisdictions around the world.
You can't get root without proving your competence and signing an agreement that says you will only install apps that have been approved.
Sometime ask for permission to edit a config file for, say, a webserver to save the admin time. In fact, ask for vi permission because that's your favourite editor:
sudo vi /etc/httpd/httpd.conf
Password:
:sh
sh#
Just a random "trick" you can use to get around things like that. To OP:
I manage my 200-odd machines via ssh-keys and push scripts each night. It's not as pretty as a GUI, but I don't need pretty, I need functional. I keep a machine loaded with an accurate configuration of what should be out there, and every time I make a change on the test machine that I am happy with, I migrate it to the live machine, which pushes out the scripts. But I like the parents post theory anyway, despite what this post may have looked like.
Me failed English...
FreeBSD over Linux. If my comments seem odd, this may explain...
Have you ever met a sales person, or watched them try to use a computer? Seriously, watch them try to send a 500MB powerpoint presentation as an e-mail attachment, or ask for tech support on their limewire install, and marvel at the risk to your company.
If it's cheaper to stay with a Microsoft-based infrastructure, then stay with that. Creating massive infrastructure-wide group policies that go from desktop to web browser is sort of a windows thing. If you're going to maintain security policies in a linux-based system, you better be prepared to start thinking in Unix- that means remembering that you're using a network-based system, not a locally-oriented system on a network.
If you're setting an IT infrastructure, the costs you're cutting on licensing will probably bite you in either support, security, training, or usability/productivity. There's no such thing as free software, I'm sorry.
Why not use LSTP? That way you only have to worry about whatever image(s) you keep on the server.
Better yet, use LSD! Then all you have to worry about is why those images are talking to you.
Anybody want my mod points?
Vim supports a mode referred to as 'restricted' mode.
i.e. cp /usr/bin/vi /usr/bin/rvi
Give the user permission to run 'rvi' instead of permission to run 'vi'
Also, you needn't give root to do that; modern distros have these things called 'group permissions', or even ACLs.
You can create that user a special non-root user that they 'sudo' to in order to edit the config file, and an ACL permits just that particular user to edit the particular allowed config files.
Sneaker net?
This is linux. You do it all remotely, and you can build clone the machines pre-set up
exactly the way you want them.
This is not hard. But first you have to purge the microsoft mentality from your thinking.
Forget Sneakernet. Think more Fat-Ass net. Like me sitting here on my fat ass managing
a dozen machines for naive users located 1400 miles away.
You just never give users root access, and you set your permissions properly.
You can use SeLinux, AppArmor, or any number of free management tools that
all work remotely. You don't have to rely on everyone to act nice because
you can lock it down just as tight as you want.
If its a business, why not start with a business solution like Novell SLED.
Its made for the enterprise. And it locks down nicely.
None of this stuff is free in the windows world, but its all available
for free in the Linux world, OR you can pay for it and still save money
over Windows.
But there are free remote management utilities included with every Linux distro.
Its called ssh.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Unless users are only given a restricted shell, what prevents them from writing applications in shell script and running them?
It's either a kiosk or a fully functional Universal Turing Machine...
Well, one way to do this is to mount the users home / groups with the noexec flag. Only the system partitions should be mounted with execute permissions, and the users shouldn't have any write privileges on them.
Ever stop to think
No, au contraire. The following policy _will_ guarantee that users will act like adult human beings:
We will take a peep at your files randomly and fire you without severance the first time we find something we don't like. Period.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
Locking Down Linux Desktops In an Enterprise?
We leave our security in the hands of Mr. Worf.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Instead of spending $$$ on bondage and discipline, how about treating your users like adult human beings?
THIS is why those tools don't exist. Because every time you ask, some self-righteous idealist responds like this. Unfortunately, those self-righteous idealists are often also the really good programmers who have the ability to create such tools.
Move it to a new department? Change the entry for the machine on the DHCP server. No need to pull it in for retweaking.
Or even plugged in when you make the change.
You can use the whole disk for swap and /tmp. No individual installs. No local copies.
And the user's entire persistent state is on your fileservers, where you control the backup, maintain history (and let the user recover his OWN lost files), etc.
Meanwhile, with nothing persistent on the user's machine there's no info lost if it fries or is stolen, or if you need to upgrade his hardware. Just configure a fresh machine for netboot and replace the MAC address of his workstation with the new machine. Instant gratification.
You also get to update the software on ALL the machines by updating ONE image on the servers.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Let me try and predict this one: "[Problem they've randomly had in the last two years and didn't bother to research or bugfix] is the biggest issue in desktop Linux. The developers have lost touch because, for example, [anecdote that offers no valuable bug-ridding information, or even enough to replicate it], showing that [Problem] is still a big of a problem as it was four years ago. I've seen [however instances they've seen it, plus four] instances of this issue in my computer but also in other's, and it refuses to be fixed because Linux is simply put, not user-friendly or stable in the least bit. It's things like these that make me draw the conclusion that Linux is simply not ready for the desktop."
Unfortunately, few people in the Windows world seem to grasp that LDAP has been around for many years in the *nix world, and has all the functionality you would find in Group Policies when linked into PAM on the client side.
For a couple years, I maintained a company-wide network that supported unified "home" directories and unified login/password capabilities between Windows workstations, Linux workstations, and Solaris servers, all tied back to Fedora Directory Server. It was hell to set up, and sweet to watch in action.
Active Directory and Group Policies aren't bad for simple installations, but really turn into a mess quickly depending on your setup. LDAP and *nix systems that support PAM are a snap to set up, work fairly well and took significantly LESS time to get working properly than the Windows side did.
There's a lot of research that goes into setting up either side of the equation. Linux/Unix has been more ready for the "enterprise" desktop than Windows has, though, and that's a cold hard fact.
In Linux it's done with policies in LDAP that are used to set variables for login scripts. Using standard Linux tools (written 20+ years ago for UNIX systems), the login process can report back what machine, IP address, etc a user is accessing. That coupled with the group structures in LDAP are used to set environment variables that dictate everything a user can access.
If it weren't for the boneheaded point-n-click gui that windows crams down every admins throat, even windows admins would see that their precious AD is just ldap with environment variables modified by scripts.
You talk about converting 300 seats. I converted 2000 to LTSP desktops. All driven by only 33 servers. See here for details: http://www.localnetsolutions.com/press.html
If you are still stuck, my contact info is on the site. I consult.
What you are forgetting is that most companies, especially large companies ARE boring places staffed by a high percentage of mediocre people. Large organizations have a large amount of administrative overhead, and the vetting process is long, convoluted, and inefficient. It's just the nature of the beast.
1) IT staffed by control freaks? Well duh! It's the only way they can appear to be doing something and not getting their asses handed back to them if anything goes wrong...
2) Trust? How much do YOU trust people you know just barely well enough to remember their name? And anytime you get more than 5 people together, they start grouping up and taking sides. Disputes soon follow. Care to guess what it's like when there are 500?
3) Hiring standards? Have you seen who applies to Monster.com ads? As an employer, I can say the domain name is appropriate...
4) unrealistc expectations... It's often hard enough to simply establish expectations at all. 5) Morale? You want to talk about morale!?!? Large companies spend months rolling out big updates like using actual coffe in the coffe makers at their 2,000 store fronts, or on 6 month programs toget locations to clean their bathrooms. Wait until you spend a man-week working yer ass off because somebody didn't know what 'historic' meant, only to find you didn't need to do anything at all. Then see what your morale is like.
6) Unmotivated employees? Your average wage slave is motivated by a desire to do as little as possible and not get yelled at.
Go work at/for/with some large organizations sometime. You'll see why Dilbert is so popular - not because it's quirky and off-beat but because IT'S TRUE!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
"Like screen savers that try and install crap along with it, then there'll be all the support calls why isn't it working."
Using my remote control truth extractor, I can detect thoughts that are in your brain but not passed to your fingers on the keyboard. Combining your post with the truth extractor, I get the following:
"Treating adults like adults is good in theory, but when you have 300+ people trying to..."
Do their jobs
"...you want to take away as much..."
productivity
"...as possible." So we can feel like we are in charge of something. Even the little people need to feel big every so often. In order to keep our jobs, we need to make sure people need us. Thanks to lockdowns, they will.
Is that awesome technology or what?
Would you rather make people stop working and call the helpdesk when they need some kind of app that is (a) harmless and (b) freely available? And it's OK if they wait: 15 minutes? an hour? all day? So you can prevent a call from a guy who screws up the SCREEN SAVER???
Instead of making Mr. Screensaver wait in the queue because of his counterproductive antics, YOU MAKE EVERONE ELSE WAIT INSTEAD???
Such a strategy would only make sense if >50% of all calls were for unnecessary/unauthorized things. And IF that were true, then a lockdown would work so well that support staff could be cut, right?
Any wonder why IT departments are referred to as the "preventers of information services"???
What happens if they boot Knoppix from CD? Works pretty well in Windows shops as well. Lockdown the BIOS from CD boot? There are numerous published backdoor passwords; almost every BIOS has one.
BTW, this is a much bigger problem in Windows shops, where people tend to go crazy with pirated stuff, trial versions, spyware, and network bandwidth wasters -- all of which contribute to real risks and system instability. Taking away root access solves most of this in Linux, whereas in Windows it's the full employment act for the helpdesk unless you surrender to the draconian tradeoffs described above.
I think the point of the G...GP post was that you can't easily push this out remotely, and on Linux you have to write it, support it and debug it yourself, including all the niggly corner cases.
Frankly Windows has some cool Enterprise stuff that makes this easier.
It's worth noting that these policies aren't Microsoft deciding willy-nilly how you will use your computer. It's the Fortune 500+ companies, and their equivalents in Europe, Asia-Pac etc, who have requested this. They have very big wallets. They spend way more on MS than we do. And apparently some dorkwad once determined that allowing users to set their own desktop background wastes time and thus money, so they want to lock things down, protect themselves from lawsuits etc, and ensure they are paying people to work, not skive off typing long comments on /. ...
Ahem. As I was saying.
In these sorts of cases (desktop wallpaper, sound schemes), to me, the benefit is not time and money, it's the ability to avoid a lawsuit because Big Stu the ladies' man in the centre of the office decided to have some porno chick as his wallpaper and porno sounds for new emails et al. And the 30 women around him get offended and sue the company for letting him be a dickhead even though there's a clear policy in place.
That's a good point, but the kind of huge organization you mention will have in-house IT people who can that anyway, and I still think the advantage of a FOSS platform outweighs the relatively lack of ready-to-go deployment facilities.
Any of the major repository systems can be set up in a custom configuration with client machines automatically sucking packages up from a central company repository. Redhat's up2date and satellite systems are especially geared toward this kind of deployment.
If I'm understanding this correctly, you get application installation automation for free with your centralized repository, perhaps automated with cfengine, puppet, or even ssh-in-a-loop.
This is hard, and I'll admit Windows has an edge here, though personally, I feel like that's a little bit about North Korea having an edge in oppression compared to the US; it's not necessarily something desirable.
That said, if you must do something like this, there are ways. Other comments for this article address this point better than I do. For starters, there's kiosk mode "KDE's Kiosk Mode, allows a system administrator to configure all aspects of the desktop for an end user and optionally prevent the end user from making modifications to the provided setup."
Gnome also supports a lockdown system.
And as a last resort, you can always patch the software and distribute the patched version to all your machines.
You've already installed Linux. I doubt they can install anything on there that would be a problem, not without gunning for your job that is.
09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
+2 Troll is Slashdot's way of saying groupthink is confused
Guess what? noexec doesn't do jack shit on the majority of Linux systems, and does not prevent anybody from running a. You know why? /lib/ld-linux.so.2. (On x86_64, there's also /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2.)
Oh really? Seeing how mmap(2) requires the PROT_EXEC flag to make segments executable in the MMU, and checks those flags against the mode of the i-node, I found that hard to believe, and have it a try. These are the results:
Which is not the same as 'sudo rvi'. You can set sudo to only allow certain commands, so if you allowed 'sudo rvi', you couldn't run 'sudo ~/vi'.
sudo filters by the command executed (I've seen things restricted to full command line - i.e. sudo killall -HUP ircd but not sudo killall ircd).
There's an old saying that says pretty much whatever you want it to.
Adn how long would it take me to SSH into 40,000 desktops to update Adobe Reader 8 to Adobe Reader 9, because there is some new feature that someone decided we just have to implement?
How long to copy the browser link to 40,000 desktops to comply with a mandatory ethics reporting plan we had to put in place? How long to patch 40,000 kernels for a security hole that must be resolved within 72 hours due to Corporate Information Security policy?
you guys that complain about heavy handed IT policies don't realize, that we don't even drive a lot of this stuff. If it was an IT idea, no one would ever give us the money we need to buy these tools. It's all driven from the top down.
Perhaps you've never heard of cssh?
I use it to patch and update ~ 15 linux machines at the same time--in about 3 minutes. Patching a comparative number of Windows servers takes 30 minutes and a reboot.
In all seriousness though, cssh might not work so well for 40,000 machines. You'd probably have to have a 70 inch monitor...
There's no place like
Installing a pre-packaged app is difficult without su privileges, but you can easily build something in a directory that you can set files to executed.
Group policy in Windows is about stopping casual users from breaking policy too easily. Experienced professionals have means to circumvent protections on their workstations.
You can't easily build a thing without compilers, esp. when your home directory is on a filesystem mounted NOEXEC, so you can't run binaries from it.
And Esp. when disk quotas are in place, such that large binaries would set off alerts, and get sysadmins probing around to find out why you suddenly got a few hundred megs of .o files in your directory.
If you're concerned about users compiling their own binaries, then you should be just as concerned about them booting their systems from a CD or USB stick, or opening the case, swapping out the hard drive, or booting single user and gaining root, and goofing off in an OS you have no control over.
Er, Computer use policy. Section 2.
If you leave your system unlocked (accidentally or intentionally) and someone dicks with it, we will fire you immediately, and the other person as soon as we review the cubicle surveillance tapes.
Use a boot loader password.
:)
Disable CD/USB boot in BIOS or make the hard drive boot first(and password protect it... with clever users, lock the box so no one can clear the CMOS).
The bottom line though is that if someone has physical access to 'your' box, it's no longer yours. This applies to security as well as users. The only thing you can do is make the process so painful and bothersome that they decide it's not worth it.
Speak softly and carry a big stick. Keeping a CAT5 cable that terminates to a power outlet is a good tool to have handy. Plug it in to the spot on the patch panel where the trouble user's connection is - they'll get the point after a couple of 'hardware failures' for their desktop.
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
cssh is great for a handful of computers, but for the 40,000 boxen, try cfengine
Unfortunately few people in the *nix world seem to grasp that LDAP is just a protocol (that's the P bit of the acronym). It's just a standard way of accessing directories - which is what Active Directory is (as is OpenLDAP etc etc). LDAP means nothing as a reference to a directory - OpenLDAP might in your case. So what you meant to say was "directories (that are accessible via LDAP) have been around for years". Whether they do everything the particular implemention of Active Directory does is up for question - some may, some may not. It depends on implementation...
Bingo.
If you don't restrict sudo, you can do anything. I would bet that most people here use sudo for full root access and not restricted commands, and don't understand this.
But back to the apache example, why oh why are people still starting it as root with the config files being owned by root? That's nuts. Use iptables to redirect port 80 to 8080 (and 443 to 8443) and get off the "root crackpipe."
To be honest, the legacy requirement that you must be root to run applications on ports less than 1024 doesn't make sense in the modern security world and Linux (along with OSX, Solaris, etc.) should dump it. Unix derivitives are the ONLY OS's with such restrictions, and the workarounds of starting as root and dropping privs is just a bloody nightmare and SOOOOO unneeded. Along similar lines, native jailing of apps really should be built in to the OS. BSD has it, Solaris has it, Linux needs it. Right now it's bloody difficult to jail a user to a portion of the filesystem. vservers help but are not a true replacement for being able to jail a user (or hundreds of users) to a limited area.