I maintain a network with 10 public access computers for the Livingston-Park County Public Library with plans to buy several more in the next few weeks. Until recently all of these computers were running Windows XP and were secured using software provided by the Gates Foundation. Despite being fully patched, locked down and running up-to-date antivirus software, malware still found a way to infect these systems. Applying updates every Patch Tuesday on every computer was consuming most of my time. Even a simple change required me to sit down at each system and make that change, usually fighting the security policy to make it stick.

A few days ago Windows started showing signs of corruption so I decided it was time to reinstall the OS. This time I considered securing them with Microsoft SteadyState, a free public access computer security tool. I recently used SteadyState on the new laptops and immediately remembered the problems with Adobe Flash and JAVA. Instead of rebuilding the systems with Windows, I decided to use Ubuntu as I was already familiar with it and 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) was recently released. One hour later I had downloaded, burned, installed and updated Ubuntu on the first computer. At this point I decided to make it boot via PXE. Booting Ubuntu via PXE would allow for one update on one system and all systems would be affected. This means no more wasted time typing the same command on every computer. Hard to argue with that.

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