[tlug] System management software?

[Larry Stanbery <lstanber@example.com>]

Well, after about two days of Google'ing for answers, hopefully I can 
draw on the collective knowledge of you folks...

We're looking at *shudder* WinXP for a class lab environment (can't 
convince the higher-ups that Linux gives us what we want -- they 
believe it's just for servers and geeks).  I'm trying to find some sort 
of software that gives us the ability to lock those machines down so 
that malicious activities get cleaned up after reboot.

I've searched on PXE boot, lab mangement software, windows, linux, etc. 
  I get pages and pages of garbage that doesn't help.  I've also 
"dreamed up" a scenario wherein I'd use GRUB to boot a small 
environment to simply do disk-mirroring ("dd") from a Linux partition 
(invisible to Windows) onto the "main" partition (of course, I'd have 
to write some software to do this, likely, or seriously tweak a Linux 
environment to do it).  Another possibility is to do PXE boot and serve 
up an image from my Linux server to the client -- though I'd have to 
figure out just how long that would take, etc., and how it would play 
in a 20-seat lab with all of the machines firing at once (tried doing 
Mac NetBoot using Linux server, but ran into trouble with the time it 
took to download and with trying to fire numerous tftp sessions).

Many thanks for your thoughts.

- - - - - - - -
Larry Stanbery, RHCE
GPG Key ID: 2CEFA662

Attachment: PGP.sig
Description: PGP signature