A number of good pieces of advice have been given here. I will add a few
items based on a few years of working with several hundred university
computing labs (primarily Windows 95 and 98 during my time).

If you cannot move to Windows 2000 or another NT-based version of Windows, I
suggest using software like PCRDist (http://www.pyzzo.com/pcrdist/). It
allows your workstations to be self-healing to a degree. We wrote our own
program years ago to perform basically the same function. It, combined with
Ghost, was the basis for keeping Win9x labs up and running. I don't think a
Win9x lab is very manageable without some level of self-repair.

Installing applications on locked server shares can also help to reduce the
downtime of computing services.

We have used Poledit for locking down the desktop, it keeps out the vast
majority of people. We did not have individual profiles for each user
(until now with Windows 2000), we auto-logged-in each machine with a single
account, thus a single profile. Now with Windows 2000, we have a program
that deletes profiles at login.

There are some other cute tricks we used, like blocking users from setting
WWW images from IE or Netscape as the background.

I definitely think NT based labs are easier to run, but we have run a lot of
Win9x ones and
have managed quite well.

Brad Judy
Information Technology Services
University of Colorado at Boulder

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jason F. [mailto:mistertumnusyahoo.com]
> Sent: Monday, October 15, 2001 4:50 PM
> To: focus-mssecurityfocus.com
> Subject: NT Server - 98 WkStn Highschool Lab - Help!
>
>
> I administer several labs in a rural school division.
> I am often not in these labs for days at a time and
> often chaos has ensued-i.e. - saved user profiles,
> deleted icons and programs, file renaming, etc... I
> did not set up this lab and am wondering the best way
> to reconfigure it, using the existing technology. Any
> suggestions? Here's the specs:
>
> -WINNT 4 Server - latest Service Packs
>
> - Windows 98 - First Edition - (yes, we were right on
> the ball buying the latest MS OS back in '98!)
>
> - Security by Policy Editor and Group Policies - I
> like being able to control some things with this but I
> apparently must have user profiles enabled to use
> Poledit and this allows users to save their profiles
> which means when they screw something up and can't get
> it to work the next time they log on a teacher will
> tell me that the computer is broken
>
> - I'd also like to be able to keep track of where each
> individual user goes on the Internet - when I check
> cookie files - every user has the same cookies for
> some reason
>
> - I'd like to give everybody the same desktop but some
> computers have different programs on them than others
>
> Well those are my main security issues, if anyone has
> any hints or suggestions I'd greatly appreciate it.
>
> Thanks,
> Jason Forester
> Computer Technician
>
>
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