locking down a computer for public use

S

sploiz

Guest
in the company i work for we have 3 computers setup for public use and i'm having issues locking them down. i've tried 2 different programs from microsoft and a couple more from other companies. currently i'm using on from microsoft that they stopped supporting a few years ago, but its the best one i've found so far.

i have the 3 computers setup so you can only use internet explorer, aim, yahoo messenger, and ms messenger. i've done my best to restricted everything else, but people are still finding ways to save items to the desktop and change the background. changing the background is one of the main problems. nothing worse to get to work to see some porn on the desktop.

now my next question. is there any way to block the majority of porn sites? how we have it setup its really hard to actively monitor the computers and we really don't have time for it since we're also a computer repair shop.

for the past 2 years i've pretty much tried everything i can think of and i'm out of ideas so i have to ask y'all for help.
 
It sounds like you're aiming for something with more functionality than a kiosk, but more limited than a standard workstation. Is this correct?

How do you feel about Linux? It would be rather easy to lock down a Linux box like that by just setting permissions appropriately.
 
i really don't have any experience with linux so that would be a bit difficult.

currently i have a blank desktop and in the start menu there's choices for only internet explorer, aim, msn, and yahoo. some of the people that use the computer i have to show them how to get to those and start it. i think if we changed to linux some of these people would have no clue what to do which would just be more work on us showing them how to do it a new way.
 
If the public user accounts are in the "guests" group, and not in the "users" group, then changes to the user profile should not be saved when they exit.
If you need more on top of that, you may want to look into software such as DeepFreeze.
 
If you don't want any changes to be made, a combination of Group Policies and Microsoft's Shared Computer Toolkit will work. You can also look at hardware devices like Centurion.

As far as filtering out sites, you will either need to setup a "deny all" policy and allow certain sites or setup some kind of filtering system where you can get regular updates.
 
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