Is there a WebMasterWorld for sysadmins?

WebMasterWorld for sysadmins needed. Lockdown for school network XP PC's.

[MattyUK]

WebMasterWorld has been a wonderful help to me on all matters related to web sites and servers. However I now find myself in need of a 'WebMasterWorld' for system administration.

I attended a recent interview at a school and found myself curious about the best way to 'lock down' an XP system on a windows network from abuse by students. I realise there are Group Policy settings that can be used but I wondered if the best way would be to apply the restrictions, create an image then have the system re-imaged at every boot, overnight. Preferably storing the image in an hidden partition (ideally encrypted). At least that way any student imposed changes would not be persistent.

I wanted somewhere to pose the above question/situation and discuss/learn of other approaches or how to achieve the goal.

In this instance WebMasterWorld isn't applicable. Does anyone know of anywhere else they can recommend?

Regards,
Matt

[edited by: MattyUK at 8:30 pm (utc) on Aug. 2, 2007]

[Gibble]

Hi. For this, we used a program called deepfreeze at a college I worked at. And there was a second drive (can't remember if it was a network mapped share or not) where students could store work "locally" that was persistent.

[bcolflesh]

MS has a free product for this very purpose:

[microsoft.com...]