Help establishing internet kiosks at work...

Crashsector

Junior Member
Jan 6, 2002
13
0
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Hey everyone. Some of you may remember me a while back, I had almost the same question as I do today. I work for a small cafe in Annapolis and we have 3 computers for public internet use, free of charge.

I'm trying to find some way of restricting access to the computer so that all the user CAN do is browse the internet.

We've been having problems with people changing the background, installing programs, etc., ever since we've been open. The spyware and spam software is unbelievable.

Here's a list of what we've tried and why they didn't work:

1) Honor system - Haha, yea right. Since it's free people do what ever the hell they want to it.

2) Editing local system policies - This works somewhat. It restricts the user somewhat, but it's time consuming to configure the policy. Also, the changes are not easily reversed meaning that the Administrators now are subject to the same restrictions.

3) Windows 2000 Server with a domain - Too expensive. It took way too much convincing to get the boss to drop money on the XP licenses, let alone at 2k license with an extra client pack.

4) I also looked into Linux-based kiosk distributions/applications. That's about as far as it went. I searched on SourceForge and Freshmeat for any type of solution - no go.

I would really appreciate any input you may have. The main issue here is money, the solution would have to be free and legal (if it's the perfect solution, a one-time fee can be tolerated, but not subscription).

I know this type of thing can be done, I've used it before. Thanks a lot for any help.
 

ojai00

Diamond Member
Sep 29, 2001
3,291
1
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I was just speaking to one of the managers of my school's computer lab and he told me something about a cache chip (hope I got the term correct). It's a piece of hardware that you can install into your PCI slot and any changes that are made to it are lost when the computer is restarted. Not sure where to get it from or how much it costs, but maybe someone else could enlighten us on it.

What OS are these computers using? Windows 2000 I suppose?
 

Barnaby W. Füi

Elite Member
Aug 14, 2001
12,343
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use knoppix, and possibly an nfs home directory for custom things (or rebuild knoppix with your customizations)

basically: with any linux distro or bsd, you can make a virtually indestructable system. read only hard drive, boot from cd, re-install on every boot, there's all kinds of interesting things you can do.
 

Abzstrak

Platinum Member
Mar 11, 2000
2,450
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U could just image the harddrive and burn it to a bootable disk to rebuild it and rebuild it nightly.... should only take about 15 minutes to rebuild from CD, plus if someone screws it up in middle of the day, just pop in the CD and rebuild it