Deny Write Access to Home Directory

zenix · 06-16-2006, 01:25 PM

Anyone know of a way to prevent users from writing to their home directory from within gnome on RHEL 4? I'm trying to create an Internet kiosk and want it as locked down as possible. I tried the option in Gconf, but it didn't work. Maybe I did something wrong?

Thanks for any help!

Daniel

SpelledJ · 06-16-2006, 01:30 PM

How about chmod -w /home?

zenix · 06-16-2006, 01:34 PM

you can't log into gnome if you set the home dir permissions to read/execute or read only.

Thanks for your reply.

SpelledJ · 06-16-2006, 02:57 PM

I didn't know that was the case with Gnome. You might try experimenting with leaving the appropriate hidden config directories under /home/user writeable, but remove write access on the rest of the directory. Try logging into Gnome and checking the time stamps on everything under the user directories to see what gets written to.

zenix · 06-16-2006, 05:47 PM

That is what I did when I was testing it. I know that the user must have write access to serveral of the hidden directories, so I only changed the permission on the user's home directory directly.

Thanks again.

chrism01 · 06-28-2006, 12:07 AM

Safe thing to do is wipe/reinstall user acct after each use. You just can't be too sure.
Alternatively, use Terminal Server approach: http://www.ltsp.org/