Most companies I’ve worked at where employees had a Microsoft work computers. They were under heavy control, even with admin privileges. I was wondering, for a corporate environment, how employees’Linux desktops could be kept under control in a similar way. What would be an open source or Linux based alternative to the following:

  • policy control
  • Software Center with software allow lists
  • controlled OS updates
  • zscaler
  • software detection tool to detect what’s been installed and determine if any unallowed software is present
  • antivirus
  • VPN

I can think of a few things, like a company having it’s own software repos, or using an atomic distribution. There’s already open source VPN solutions if course. But for everything else I don’t really know what could be used or what setup we could have.

    • gaael@lemmy.world
      0·
      3 months ago

      For the execution, can’t you configure the fstab with noexec on partitions where the user has write permissions and give the user read-only permissions on the root partition ?

      I think this would be fine for most jobs, the exception being software development where you usually need to execute stuff to test your programs.

  • bizdelnick@lemmy.ml
    0·
    3 months ago

    If you want to control users, don’t give them admin privileges.

    Most of things you enumerated solve windows specific problems and therefore have no analogs in other OSes.

    • Cyborganism@lemmy.caOP
      0·
      3 months ago

      That’s the thing. They need some admin access. Especially if they’re working in IT and need to do certain tasks that require that privilege.

      • lolcatnip@reddthat.comEnglish
        01·
        3 months ago

        The simplest solution is to set up the sudoers file to allow only specific commands your users need. I assume you need more than that, but what kinds of use cases does that solution fail to handle?

  • AlexanderESmith@kbin.social
    0·
    3 months ago

    In no particular order;

    • Detecting “installed” software is iffy. Linux can have all kinds of things running on it that aren’t “installed” as-such (same as Windows with portable EXEs, Linux has AppImage/etc). Excepting things like that, you can detect installed apps through the package managers (apt/pkg/yum/snap/etc).
    • OS updates in Debian-likes and Redhat-likes are controllable out of the box, but I’m not familiar with a way to prevent a user from doing them (other than denying them root access, which might make it hard for them to use the system, depending on what they need to do).
    • I’ve had a lot of good results with OpenVPN.
    • lol antivirus. Not saying Linux doesn’t get viruses, or that there arent antiviruses for Linux, but the best way to avoid getting them is still to just avoiding stupid shit. Best thing I can offer is that if you have some kind of centralized storage, check that for compromised files frequently, and keep excellent backups. And make sure your firewalls and ACLs don’t suck.