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Using Pen Drives in Public

B

bignasty

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jan 13, 2004
Messages
249
I am an admin at a public library and we are looking into allowing people to use pen drives on our computers, but here is where the problem lies, all of our machines are locked down with gpo and a program call fortres and the individual user does not have permission to install hardware...

I am looking at two options, one either something that will allow me to let users add their pen drives but make no other changes or a network based option, something along the lines of a usb hub that either can be connected to one of the servers and then they would access the drives once they plug them in, but with that i need to be able to map the drives or at least make shortcuts to them before they exist! It would be nice if there was some type of USB hub that was networkable that we could do something like this with... Any Ideas??
 
I wouldn't allow it, One user has a virus (or multiple) and brings the usbdrive and plugs it into your comp.... you get the point.
 
Yeah, I wouldn't allow it, but if you want to do it, it can be done. Just set the policy to install non-certified drivers silently. It will then load the driver for the pen drive without asking.
 
We keep virus software up to date... i am not concerned with viruses as i may only do it with one machine... i just wonder if fortres is going to hender me
 
Yeah one machine not networked to the other computers, just the internet I would do.
 
I work with computers in my school so i am familiar with fortress. Now, USB Pen Drives are allowed in the computers however currently the internet is down in the entire building because of an rcf or rfc (i forget) virus and problems with the Department of Education. That being said, I need a pen drive to do things that I do with the computers. You should allow it as it is definately becoming more and more popular and more efficent then a floppy. A virus can happen when someone is accessing their email, or even putting in a CD, in my opinion, Email is a lot more risky then a pen drive.
 
can you stop someone from coming in with the half life2 demo on his pen drive, installing it and play games for the rest of the day?
 
The_Terminator said:
can you stop someone from coming in with the half life2 demo on his pen drive, installing it and play games for the rest of the day?
Click to expand...
I think Steam works well enough for that. ;)

We tired something like this at one of the schools I had worked at (we used FoolProof which is a POS BTW :rolleyes: ) and couldn't get FP to work right with it, eventually I just took FP off and used a limited Windows account making the kids login instead.

I'm not too familair with fortress so I can't be of much help I guess.
 
As for games the machines they are mainly p3 933 w/ 128 SDRAM, if they want to play half life 2 let 'em try.... Fortres stops installs anyway so im not to worried about it, anything on the network option that might work|?
 
CrimandEvil said:
I think Steam works well enough for that. ;)
Click to expand...
heh heh. ok, another hypothetical scenario:
There are several very popular games that don't need installs and they don't rely on the registry at all.
Some clever kid copies the entire game from his pen drive to the library computer. No install necessary. Now they can play for the rest of the day.

I agree with the above poster who wrote that eventually, kids will be walking around with pen drives instead of floppies to do their homework and stuff, but my above scenario does pose a problem. I think.
 
sorry, cant do that either, users may not make not save information to the harddrive and all the macihnes are using usb1 so playing from the drive would be useless
 
I always took the stance that if the kid was clever enough to do it he should be clever enough to cover his tracks. ;)

It wasn't a problem for us though, since I was the tech at a middle school we use to load up some games every other Friday and play but only after school was out. :) My boss never found out and the only other tech-knowledgeable teacher would join in (he's my neigbor and was the Music teacher) as well. :)
 
When I first read the thread title, I wondered...I was going to ask if there were laws against "pen drive exhibitionism" in your region....
 
I'm not familiar with this particular software but at my old Highschool they ran a program called Deep Freeze which reset all settings, removed anythingthat was installed etc. and reverted the sytem to the orriginal intended state.

To get the drives working we just disabled the software (of course I wasn't hacking it the teacher disabled it), and I installed the pen drive drivers (since it was windows 98) and then re-enabled depp freeze and then any time I plugged my drive into that computer therw was no problem.

I'm thinking you should just get a few sample pen drives, disable your software and install the drives on the system and let the drivers get loaded. Now when you put the drives in the system maybe they will work with the software enabled. I think doing this networked hub stuff is probably a waste of money/time, there's got to be a secure way to do it on the systems I would think. Maybe talk to the tech support for the software and maybe they will have a solution for you.
 
bignasty said:
sorry, cant do that either, users may not make not save information to the harddrive and all the macihnes are using usb1 so playing from the drive would be useless
Click to expand...
ok.
so, uh... lets say that while you're not looking, they open the case install a usb 2 controller card, close it up, and then play the game straight from the usb key?
Ha! I've got ya there, smarty pants!
 
i take a robotic engineering course at my high school and we work alot with 3d modeling programs so everybody has a thumb drive to save there work on, my teacher isnt very computer literate, he can model in 3d but thats about it and there isnt any software that prohibits us in anyway. we dont get many viruses cause everybody is too lazy to bring a virus over and put it on one of the comps. the teacher trusts me so much that when we got new cases for the comp's he let me change out all the systems and he writes the windows xp pro cd keys on the inside of the side panel, its not my fault if my hand accidentally copys some of them down, what do we say $20 bucks a pop :D
 
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