this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2024
169 points (95.7% liked)

Linux

48129 readers
429 users here now

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

Rules

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 9 points 7 months ago

policy control

It's not exactly the same, but you could use puppet to enforce configuration

Software Center with software allow lists

You can setup a custom repository with only approved software and then set that as the only one that the system is configured to retrieve packages from. This can also be controlled via puppet.

controlled OS updates

Same as the previous point. Upgrades are installed from the repos.

zscaler

I don't know what that is/does, and their website isn't helping.

software detection tool to detect what's been installed and determine if any unallowed software is present

I'm pretty sure carbon black app control has a linux version.

antivirus

There are a number of different antivirus solutions for linux. A quick search will give you a bunch of lists. I'm not personally familiar with any of the options, but I don't imagine it will be difficult to find one that will work for your use case.