iamnotageek
Vendor
We sell/service computers to motels/hotels in town and some of these end up in the guest lobby to be used by guests that don't carry computers with them. We also sell Norton Antivirus/Internet Security. One headache is that even with a limited or guest XP account, it is possible for guests to make changes to settings that cause grief.
A way to prevent this is to use Microsoft's free Shared Computer Toolkit to lockdown XP by removing menu options and severely restricting rights for the 'public' account and confining any changes that are made to a sandbox area in unallocated space on the hard drive.
A limitation is that any process or automated task that requires admin priveleges (e.g. running LiveUpdate, Windows Update) will not function when logged in as 'public' - but the toolkit is smart enough to log out as public and login as admin when the automatic Windows Update scheduled task is due to run. Since the default setting for this is 3am, most guests will be snug in their beds when this happens.
To address the issue of updating anti-spyware/virus software, Microsoft recommends using scripts to perform such updates during the Windows Update window. I know about the Intelligent updater, but there doesn't seem to be any tool provided by Symantec for the retail version of Norton AV/NIS to perform a scheduled run of LiveUpdate. I suppose I could create some kind of batch that would download the intelligent updater via ftp and then install it, but the name of the intelligent updater file changes every week.
As I understand it, LiveUpdate checks every 5 minutes for updates, so one might suppose that it would check during this window and download/install updates, but I haven't tested this theory yet.
Using the corporate version of NAV and getting updates from the local server is not an option, as these lobby machines are necessarily firewalled from the rest of the private networks at the motel.
Has anyone here tried scheduling LiveUpdate for maintenance windows?
A way to prevent this is to use Microsoft's free Shared Computer Toolkit to lockdown XP by removing menu options and severely restricting rights for the 'public' account and confining any changes that are made to a sandbox area in unallocated space on the hard drive.
A limitation is that any process or automated task that requires admin priveleges (e.g. running LiveUpdate, Windows Update) will not function when logged in as 'public' - but the toolkit is smart enough to log out as public and login as admin when the automatic Windows Update scheduled task is due to run. Since the default setting for this is 3am, most guests will be snug in their beds when this happens.
To address the issue of updating anti-spyware/virus software, Microsoft recommends using scripts to perform such updates during the Windows Update window. I know about the Intelligent updater, but there doesn't seem to be any tool provided by Symantec for the retail version of Norton AV/NIS to perform a scheduled run of LiveUpdate. I suppose I could create some kind of batch that would download the intelligent updater via ftp and then install it, but the name of the intelligent updater file changes every week.
As I understand it, LiveUpdate checks every 5 minutes for updates, so one might suppose that it would check during this window and download/install updates, but I haven't tested this theory yet.
Using the corporate version of NAV and getting updates from the local server is not an option, as these lobby machines are necessarily firewalled from the rest of the private networks at the motel.
Has anyone here tried scheduling LiveUpdate for maintenance windows?