Leasing netbooks

[MRT]

Our IT teacher is wanting to lease netbooks to 6th formers but we are trying to work out how to set up the internet to work at school and home because of the proxy settings. Also we don't want to give them any admin rights because this will only open up a can of worms and to be honest i don't really want it to happen anyway.

[mstarkie]

Proxy settings one is easy enough.Simplest way is to create two accounts on computer one School and one Home. Home one has no proxy, school one has proxy. Only slight problem is linking work from one to the other. You could create a partition and give insturctions to use that as "My Documents".

Id defintly agree that you should lock them down hard and maybe put notices on them saying that it will take up to 5 days to repair if broken. Only down fall to that i suppose is that you could be blamed for late assignments.

Quickest thing would defintly be to have an image ready to go on when errors occur ether WDS or Ghost maybe. You could even go full hog and make a cutom recovery DVD that could be borrowed for quick repair.

Good for kids not so good for us techs!

MS

[LosOjos]

If they have linux installed on them, WICD lets you set scripts to run when the computer connects to a certain network: I tried this on my netbook so that when I connect to the school network it automatically configures the proxy, when it disconnects it removes the proxy. I had a bit of trouble getting it working though as there seems to be no documentation anywhere on how to do this!

[soveryapt]

How do you deliver the proxy settings in school? Do you currently use a Autoconfiguration file / PAC file or similar?

If so, and you're running a DHCP server too, add an entry to the DHCP Server called WPAD with the assigned number of 252 set as string.

On the DHCP server, enable this setting and put in the link to your autoconfiguration file and then when the machine picks up it's DHCP lease, it should also get the internet proxy settings so long as your PAC file is written correctly and you have Auto Discover Setting enabled for the Internet Settings.

I've just started doing this at my school and it works a dream with our auto config script. In the past I had issues ensuring that the computers would work properly off site for the internet.

Certainly lock the beasts down though. Just because they're leasing them, they are still school property. Of course, with the lease part of the agreement, there probably needs to be some give in the rules for installing their own printers etc, but certainly any software required I'd of thought would be installed by your guys before it goes out on lease?

[HilcrRWise]

We use a vbs startup script that pings the IP address of school network computer (in our case our internal smartcache server) and if successful modifies the proxy settings in the registry but if the IP address is not found the proxy settings are disabled.

[Sandman]

I agree with the "Two Accounts" option.

Just dial down their privilages on both accounts and it should work for your needs.

[stevenr]

We install "IE7Pro" for internet explorer (it does work with IE8) and the foxyproxy firefox extension on our netbooks. Both seem to work very well. They then have one locked down account.

We've also started doing this for teaching staff laptops.

[CyberNerd]

we use an autoconfiguration script (pac file). It's a browser setting in most browsers. it can load from your webserver.
It detects if the client has a school ip range (ours is 172.16 range) then proxies those but not others

function FindProxyForURL(url, host)
{

// Variable strings to return

var proxy_yes = "PROXY 172.16.0.197:8000";
var proxy_no = "DIRECT";

// Execptions for direct connection

if (shExpMatch(url, "http://internal.site.sch.uk*")) { return proxy_no; }



// Proxy if PC is on local LAN

if (isInNet(myIpAddress(), "172.16.0.0", "255.255.0.0"))
return "PROXY 172.16.0.197:8000";

// Below for Firefox bug when running on Linux by checking localhost

else if (isInNet(myIpAddress(), "127.0.0.0", "255.0.0.0"))
return "PROXY 172.16.0.197:8000";

// Everything else to go direct

else
return "DIRECT";
}

[powdarrmonkey]

we use an autoconfiguration script. It's a browser setting in most browsers. it can load from your webserver.
It detects if the client has a school ip range (ours is 172.16 range) then proxies those but not others

That's really useless if your range happens to collide with the range used at home (and yes, it does collide with mine, partly because you've used the entire RFC1918 Class B range).


The best option is automatic proxy detection and DHCP option 252 or true DNS-based WPAD.

[glennda]

I have a Script which i place in the students startup folder - normally for our sixth formers personal laptops it then when loaded prompts for an input if asking are you at home depending on the outcome it either sets a proxy setting or disables the proxy.

Toby

[Cue]

Depending on your setup, could you not set them with no proxy and then deal with it server side? So if a certain MAC connects to the network, it'll route everything through the proxy.

Also, good luck on actually keeping them secure, contrary to popular belief, there are plenty of students that could easily bypass anything you throw at them if they had enough time, the only reason they're not roaming your admin accounts now is because they'd have to be unsupervised for a long time, give them a laptop for a day and they'll be at the root by the end of it. I can name plenty of students down here that could quite easily pull that off. =P Don't be surprised if you find a different OS on them (BIOS password won't help you for long, like I said, time and lack of supervision...).