Public terminals lock-down problem
Feb 9th, 2005 by ShaunO
Running student or public workstations has always been a time-consuming task from the perspective of setting them up so they are ‘locked down’. I have been using Public Web Browser (PWB) as part of the solution on both some public terminals and some internal machines which require restricted web browsing access.
PWB is very configurable (removing right click menus, disabling opening of new pages, total control over whether there are menus or not and what toolbar buttons are visible etc etc) but because of the nature of Windows if one has enough undisturbed time in front of a machine which is ‘locked down’ with PWB it is likely that a way around PWB might be found; this generally has more to do with the Windows/IE combination itself rather a weakness in PWB.
PWB can also act as a controller for a list of URLs but of course this doesn’t help if someone finds a way out of PWB. I would recommend that if you have web filtering ability on your internet connection that you reinforce the URL policy for these types of machines at that level.
You may also want to explore whether you need to use other tools which Team Software supply such as SetPWB (zip) and/or ManageIE (zip) to further tighten potential holes which the Windows/IE combination may leave open.
Team Software also supply a range of other utilities to help support PWB deployments.
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