Hey all,

I work for a school that will be installing 20 + Toshiba NB100 next September for students in class rooms and i am wondering does anyone have any suggestions on ways to manager all of this.

At present we have wireless network with 8 access points for all teachers and some students with OpenDNS doing all blocking, a webserver and fileserver.

What I would like to do is find out a way to block students from home and school to installing programs (easy) and downloading music, youtube etc...

What i was thinking of doing was setting up LDAP and allow users to have home directory on server and also allow for one central point of administrator for passwords and users.

Thanks

The LDAP server may not be a bad start, but you will need to look into the fact that many of these laptops will be used when they aren't connected to the internet -- make sure your authentication scheme can handle that very real possibility.

You can also lock down the user accounts as tightly as you want, but removing Flash and preventing its install will likely hamper the students' ability to visit websites other than YouTube. There will always be a trade-off between security and usability (the most secure computer is one that's powered off, after all), and you have to decide where the correct balance point is.

Check my education resources blog entry for some info. .iTalc is an interesting system.
http://www.linuxquestions.org/blog/f...sources.-1568/
some of hhe education sites there may have info on similar setups, to what you are looking to do.

Something Like Untangle on your network gateway can secure the internet and allow you to block sites, IM, P2P, etc.. easily.

Are they taking the netbooks home ? it kinda sounds like it from the one line of your post.. Not sure how you are going to manage that..

Pessulus is a nice lockdown tool for systems, but it is gnome only.. http://library.gnome.org/admin/syste...ckdown.html.en
Not sure if there is anythig similar for XFCE or whatever desktop that will be on the Netbooks you are purchasing.

Centralized account management is always a good idea..

Kids will be bringing them home, me nether but another school around the corner is doing something to stop them so when i find out will let you know.

The Toshiba have have their own desktop so not sure how exactly they run the desktop application something like a widget that sits over the full screen.

Thanks for the feedback,

I am using opendns at the moment to block category sites and thats working quite well, even thought there are ways around it.

OK from what I can find the Toshiba NB100 comes with Ubuntu Netbook Remix which is usuing the gnome desktop.

So the pessulus lockdown tool I mentioned should work on it..

Let us know what solution you work out when you get this going. I would be interested to hear your final (or in process) solution.