[KLUG Members] Drive Shield/Deep Freeze for Linux

[Tony Gettig]

On Jun 3, 2005, at 5:10 PM, mag00 wrote:

> At 04:46 PM 6/3/05 -0400, you wrote:
>
>>> Does anybody know of a product like Drive Shield or deep Freeze  
>>> for Linux?
>>>
>>
>> You explain what the heck these product do, and then we might be  
>> able to
>> help.
>>
>
> I'll answer the question of what Drive Shield and Deep Freeze are...
> My question is why one would WANT something like that for Linux?

...

Software such as these are very useful in a K-12 environment. We have  
significantly reduced support calls (and thereby costs) by deploying  
Deep Freeze to every student use computer. They all get space on a  
network drive for anything they need to save. If we suspect a  
software problem, it's as easy as powering it off and back on. POOF!  
It comes back to the golden image that was deployed. Labs are  
periodically thawed for service packs, virus signature updates, etc.  
All of them are centrally managed from a single console. Our techs  
are now dealing mainly with hardware issues.

Deep Freeze and DriveShield work great for Windows, but I haven't  
seen a need for such a program on Linux and Mac's (currently my  
favorite flavor *nix, btw). The teachers that are using Mac's are  
savvy enough assign a student to a machine, create a local account  
for them (we don't support Mac's connecting to network storage yet),  
and managing it themselves. They like it because each student can  
only see what is theirs. The UNIX security is pretty good for what  
they are doing.

So when you boil it down, Deep Freeze and DriveShield are for an OS  
with awful local security. I'm not sure Linux needs such a thing,  
especially if /home can be directed to a network drive.


Tony Gettig