network build questions/advice

[paugie]

Two organizations lean on me for hardware and sometimes software advice. I often build systems for them.

Problem is, they deal with kids, off the street kids. One takes them off the streets, off drugs, houses and teaches them. The second deals with gangs and tries to teach them. So some of the computers have to be open to them some time.

Also, many of the staff do not know safe PC usage. Many times they use USB flash disks in internet cafes and plug them into the office PCs.

Surprisingly one of the organizations' server was virus free until yesterday. The other organization has been losing OS's and data to viruses and sharing internet bandwidth with malware for years now. They would like to stay with Windows for compatibility with the outside world. But the alarming rate of infection for Windows machines seem to point to Ubuntu or somesuch other OS. Most of the workstations just need a word processor, a spreadsheet program for the accounts, a simple image processing editing program, Skype - including web camera, desktop publishing (MS Publisher look-alike), a PowerPoint look-alike for presentations, and maybe a music player for those who bring their own PC speakers.

Both have come to me asking advice. Ubuntu/Server and workstations, or MS Server/workstations? And they'd like me to handle the networking because they have been flogged by the people who plug the "new" machines into the network after a format/reinstall. But I am "bad" when it comes to networking. Is there an easy way to network?

They need an internet server, print server (to 2 HP laserjets) and the data server. Right now anyone can log in from any of the workstations using their own username and password. There seems to be a folder in the server for each of the users.

Sigh....

 

[paugie]

I am preparing a "safe PC usage" presentation for them so they would know why what they are doing is potentially dangerous to their PCs and the workplace.

Thanks to Mercutio, and the people here, what I will be sharing, I mostly learned from this place.

 

[Mercutio]

There are some special builds of Linux designed for k-12 use, like Edbuntu.

I've been helping a woman through another forum whose school district was eaten by a virus back in January. No computer in the entire district can be legally cleaned, since they don't allow anyone but admins to install software or run anything but programs from a whitelist. The admins are using Norton Corporate and let the license expire at a point without definitions that will remove that virus, and with 5,000 stations and an obviously incompetent staff of three IT people, they JUST started the process of shutting all the PCs down and actually reimaging them, and moving all the uninfected PCs to a safe and segregated network.

She switched HER school - including teacher PCs - to boot CDs of knoppix. Their network printers work and they can continue to access shared drives on the virus-infected servers. For the last four and half months, her school is the only one in her district that has had fully usable PCs.

Her comment was that the machines have been fast enough for people to work, even off the CDs, and she's had vastly less work to do because she's not having to worry about security apps or students doing amazingly stupid things with, say P2P programs.

I don't want to think about how common things like that are, and that's a compelling argument for looking at Linux in any kind of educational or lab setting.

 

[CougTek]

You can go with a Windows version of your liking. Make a relatively small primary partition (less than 20GB) for the OS and main applications. Create a second, larger, primary partition for the data. Then create a small, maybe 5GB, last partition in FAT32. Make an image of the first primary partition on it with a free imaging program like partition-saving. Create a BartPE boot CD with partition-saving on it to restore the first partition on infected machines. Instruct them to save any data on the second partition (the one FOR the data). Restore the primary partition from the image weekly or monthly, depending on the need.

Effective anitivirus programs are Avira Antivir and NOD32.
Good antispyware programs are MalwareBytes, Superantispyware, ComboFix (for PC which have mysteriously lost their internet connection). While antivirus programs update themselves automatically, most antispyware programs don't, so create automated tasks for their updating tools.

Remove the shortcuts to Internet Explorer from the Desktop, Quick Launch and the Start menu. Also remove shortcuts to Windows Media Player ; use VLC Player or something else for video and maybe Foobar2000 for audio. Forbid any use of Outlook Express, Outlook AND INCREDIMAIL! Block the network ports (on the router) for instant messaging programs like Windows Live Messenger and Yahoo Messengers.

If you do the above, there's no reason you couldn't keep the systems in proper working order for a while.

 

[Bozo]

You might also want to look into Steady State for the OS.