Windows 2000 public setup

[Julia Schult]

I got an inquiry about my setup for Windows 2000 computers, and in my answer
I hit upon some points that I realized were just my impressions about
reality.  Could people on the list help me with a reality check about the
politics and possibilities of Windows 2000?

As I said in my reply to the librarian who asked, I believe I'm giving a
talk at the Internet Librarian conference in November (in Pasadena) on "When
to Win2K your public workstations" so feedback would be a good thing... :-)

<quoted from my message>
So I'm feeling pretty good that I've created a setup that can work!  It is
14 pages of very detailed directions.  I have a document sent to me by David
Merchant of Louisiana that helped me with a lot of things, specifically
"permissions" which is a Win2K-specific feature.  Things are quite different
from the older Windows, which is no doubt why your IT people don't want to
touch it.  They no doubt want to skip a generation and are hoping that the
next big operating system will come along before they have to deal with
Win2K.  However, if the next big OS is this XP thing Microsoft is talking
about, from what I can tell that has all the security holes of the old Unix
operating systems.  (The "openness" or lack of security is what kept unix
out of corporations for years.)  Win2K is built to allow security control;
XP is built to allow the user to do anything they want (from what I can tell
in the e-news reports).

Anyhow, the setup has taken me two full weeks of being my major project to
create, and I'm hoping to get it installed on our 20 new machines by the end
of this week (3 weeks for the whole thing).  Caveat:  I'm still hoping to
rely on Deep Freeze, Centurion, or Clean Slate; however Deep Freeze won't
have a W2K version available until September 2001 at the earliest, Centurion
is pretty expensive (around $84 per computer) and Clean Slate has a "beta"
version out for Win2K which I haven't tried yet.  I'm just looking into
GoBack software, but it may be more expensive than we want to spend...

Warning:  it is not simple to set these things up.  But it is doable.  How
technically savvy are you?  Do you understand registry edits and the
concepts of file directories and user account administration?

I can send you my setup, and you can ask David for his, but each system is
different.  He is on a Novell Netware network; I'm on Windows NT.  It is
best if the workstations can run on a Windows 2000 server, because there's a
lot of Windows 2000 features you can only use if your server is Windows
2000, but we don't have any of those here yet.  He wants everything totally
locked down so the user can't even leave the browser.  We want our users to
be able to save things to disk, open things with Notepad, and so forth.  We
might even offer people a choice of Netscape or Internet Explorer (as we did
when on Windows 95) while he is using the Public Web Browser only.
<end quote>

So please share your opinions with me if they are about my words, and with
the list if they are about the issues I raise.  Thanks!

---Julia E. Schult
Access/Electronic Services Librarian
Elmira College
Jschult at elmira.edu