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.
What is ‘unallowed software’? A shell script the user wrote? Something they downloaded and compiled?
Limiting that seems fundamentally at odds with FOSS.
But not at odds with running a corporate environment.
Of course not, but you have to either trust your users to some extent or give them a system that’s locked down to the point of hindering them.
Rule one of IT is to forbid software installs.
Could be things to execute. They may run a shell script (source it if they don’t have exec permission), but they won’t have all the previleged commands (definitely no dd)
Granted most open source free software don’t have licenses that limit usage like many commercial software. You might want to keep track of the commercial software. Or look for versions that have important vulnerabilities.