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.
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.
That could solve the issue, but there are quite a few writeable locations that updaters and other pieces of software expect to be executable, but are also writeable by nornal users (/tmp for instance).
You could probably work around all this with SELinux?