- Delete or alter system files
- Alter the system settings
- Add or remove applications
To do any of these you need the sudo
password. So after installing your system you have your own account and start creating normal users. Do not tell them the sudo
password and they can not alter these. All they can do is change values in their own home.
If you want total control install ACL
(wiki: access control list)
guest
login takes care of these too. Logging in as a guest will lock down anything important. But I think you would not want this if you want to track who was responsible for altering something. guest
will make everything show up as altered by guest
. I would set up useraccont instead so you could see based on user if someone created something.
- Exceed a time limit (like an Internet Cafe)
My favourite method would be a cron
script that checks uptime and shuts down after reaching a threshold. Command for shutdown after 120 minutes:
sudo shutdown -h 120
If you put that in a script and put it into cron
with crontab -e
it would kill the machine after 2 hours.
Mind you... you will get into trouble with your users if this happens when they have some unsaved content or a website open they wanted to bookmark before the system quits.