Is there any way to make a Linux Machine either

A.Throw a Kernel Panic
B.Lock Up

Upon the unplugging of a network cable.

I stated in an earlier post that I was working on setting up a Linux network for a school. We are using a heavily customized version of Gentoo Linux. One thing that we have on test computer right now is ssh/vnc. Students tend to do some rather mischevious activities on the computers sometimes and it's impossible to lock everything down.

VNC/SSH allows us to remotely view and/or control the computer to catch students in the act and make sure that they are not misusing network resources. However some students have discovered with our Windows VNC setups that they can just unplug the network cable. So I would like to know if there is an existing solution short of physically securing the cable into the NIC that would prevent this.

I've already modified the kernel somewhat for our customized Gentoo so I can hack the kernel some more if needed.

If you're a kernel hacker I would think a tiny daemon monitoring the link status on the interface and hijacking the system keyboard and mouse input devices should be a snap.

Don't lock or panic the box ... give them 10-20 seconds so you can catch them in the act

http://www.stud.uni-hamburg.de/users...jects/ifplugd/ or http://www.red-bean.com/~bos/ to watch the network status. They are probably already in gentoo.

Hi.

There's a product out there called a wireless PC lock. This thing locks your PC if a small transponder moves out of range of the machine. The source code for the linux driver is at the bottom of this page:
http://www.voyagerproject.org/

I'm sure it would be relatively trivial to modify this to look for a network connection instead of a change in a USB device.

Dave