locking down the desktop

[Gavin McCullagh]

Hi,

On Mon, 21 Jan 2008, btabor wrote:

> Students can save to their individual network folders if they need to save
> something.

Do they have accounts though, ie is this the user's own Desktop folder or
are they logged in as some sort of guest account?

> They are cluttering their desktops with "stuff" that they do not need at
> school (non educational).

Do you make sure they wipe themselves properly too?

You could just make the Desktop/ folder read-only and point firefox at some
other directory (eg /tmp) for downloads.  This is stuff they can undo, but
it sounds like they probably just need steering away from the desktop.
It's difficult to make items in someone's home directory uneditable as they
own the parent directory so they can always take ownership effectively if
they know what they're doing.

> I'm wandering if a deep-freeze type script would be the best way to go.
> Any thoughts?

I've no idea what that means.  You could just have a nightly script that
moves all files off the desktop into /tmp.

Gavin