[Ubuntu-US-CA] Locking down Ubuntu 14.04 Unity

[Geoffrey Thomas]

I would just use the built-in guest session feature, and only create a 
real account (or even just a root password) for the staff.

https://help.ubuntu.com/stable/ubuntu-help/shell-guest-session.html

"A guest cannot view the home folders of other users, and by default any 
saved data or changed settings will be removed/reset at logout. It means 
that each session starts with a fresh environment, unaffected by what 
previous guests did." (Presumably they can still write to, like, /var/tmp, 
but that shouldn't be a problem, and you can set up a thing to clean up 
that directory at logout if really needed.)

The normal behavior of auto-mounting flash drives to the current user 
works for guest users, too.

-- 
Geoffrey Thomas
https://ldpreload.com
geofft at ldpreload.com

On Tue, 29 Sep 2015, Christian Einfeldt wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I am donating two Ubuntu 14.04 machines to a homeless shelter.  The shelter would like to prevent the residents from writing any documents to the hard drive.  The
> shelter wants to have residents download stuff to flash drives they are giving the residents.  Googling, I find nothing directly on point.  Any help is welcome.
> 
> I did find this
> 
> http://forums.linuxvoice.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=147
> 
> Which talks about locking down the user settings, but it does not prevent writing to the hard drive.
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> --
> Christian Einfeldt
> 
>