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.

  • Avid Amoeba
    28•3 months ago

    There’s Zscaler for Linux. We’re using it in our corpo.

    You have to run your software mirror no matter what. Even if it’s a proxy mirror where you don’t actually store most of the packages.

    SELinux/AppArmor for more granular access policies.

    SSSD connects local auth with AD.

    You should look into what your vendor has on offer, e.g. Landscape if you’re on Ubuntu.

    As others have said config-as-code would probably be part of the equation too.

    • @ouch@lemmy.world
      8•3 months ago

      Zscaler is corporate spyware. As far as I know, it can log all connections, even ones that don’t go through the Zscaler nodes. It can also act as MITM proxy.

      I’m doubtful about whether it’s (or at least many configurations of it) are legal in EU.

      • calm.like.a.bombEnglish
        8•3 months ago

        I hate zscaler. At my company it’s set up so that it proxies all traffic through it and comes with its own CA certificates, which breaks a lot of things - I can’t install pip packages for python, I can’t clone/work with git repos if they’re on https only. We are used to temporarily disable it to do these things because corporate won’t change the policies.

        • @ouch@lemmy.world
          7•3 months ago

          Sounds like it’s used as a MITM proxy and logs all website URLs you visit. If you live in EU that’s probably illegal.

      • Avid Amoeba
        1•3 months ago

        Sure. It’s certainly legal in NA and widely used. Any VPN can do that too. A corpo can install anything on their hardware and the hardware should be considered to be spying by default.

        Oh and MITM proxying has been a fact of every corpo I’ve worked in. It’s the only way to reliably prevent people from accessing the list of sites the corpo doesn’t want accessed.