[Gllug] university windows-only policy

[dennis furey]

I've started a new course in a university (not LSBU, despite my email
address) where students are allowed to plug laptops into the network
but only if they're running M$ operating systems. It seems odd when
the admins are clued up enough to be using Unix for their back end
stuff, and even have a few Linux boxes available for general use.
Would any admins in the group care to speculate about the reasons for
such a policy? (If there's a good one maybe I'll respect it.) I'm
guessing that it's just because they don't want to provide help desk
support for Linux. They claim to be security conscious, but I'd hate
to think they're more worried about Linux based cracking tools or
Linux users themselves than they are about windows borne viruses. If
you were the admin who made up that rule, would you rather a person
(a) just ignored you (b) waged an embarrassing public campaign to have
the rule changed or (c) asked for a special dispensation? The downside
of (b) is that the university brass are sensitive to adverse
publicity, and of (c) is that the person might tell all his friends.

I'm thinking I'd rather raise the issue and let it be their problem
than take on the burden and risk of doing anything on the sly, but
hypothetically speaking, what steps would I need to take to prevent my
laptop from being identifiable as a Linux box? Do web proxies and mail
servers normally log the client user agents and remote MTA's? Is there
anything short of shutting them down that I could do with apache and
ssh servers that I run locally? Is there any way to stop X11 from
showing up on an nmap scan and still use the GUI?

Dennis

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