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.

  • @olsonexi
    link
    98 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.

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      English
      28 months ago

      zscaler is a CASB, Cloud Access Security Broker. It’s basically a split-tunnel VPN with built-in PBR and RBAC