Bit of help/advice needed..

What kind of polices do companies have in place regarding laptop usage.. on a technical level?

do you have restrictions on the ethernet ports so they cant just plug their laptop into their home broadband?

We have a impending replacement-laptop rollout.. over 100 old win 95 based thinkpads are being replaced with 1.7gig latitudes with win xp.. (with wifi,blutooth and ethernet built in)

the problem is, ive no idea what to do about stopping the punters just plugging into their home broadband and using the internet, which of course is a corporate security risk.

do any of you use group policy or other applications/services to control stuff like this? - effectively all we want these laptops to do is check email, and run ms office.

is there some kind of built in (or free) authentication in win xp that could stop access to non-company network connections?

will be grateful for any info you can give.. this project is going to ruin my life for the next few weeks

We've recently been stung by a new GPO at work...

We have wireless running that requires a certificate for authentication. I actually found that quite handy in the sense that one of their IT engineers forgot to dismount a mapped drive on my PC once and I had access to all of their configuration and hidden files. Found the certificate, and installed it myself on my PDA so I could now log my PDA on the network

Unfortunately for me and fortunately for them, they have issued an updated certificate. In order to roll it out, they've added it to the group policy so that it installs itself when someone logs on. Saved their engineers going round to every PC / laptop to install it manually.

The downside is they have now locked all wireless configuration settigns. Whilst a certain bunch of us have local admin rights, you can change wireless settings, but when you click apply, you get a message like "Windows was unable to make the changes". Turns out that's because of this newly enforced GPO

And that's a major pain - can no longer use wireless at home now I've changed my setup and can not connect to any new WAP so forget net access at customer sites :thumbdwn:

We're looking at how we can change that because it no longer allows us to work efficiently

tfboy hinted at the solution there - Group Policies, I have no experience with this particular lockdown but obviously it's possible to lock the lappy to a particular network and prevent any other network connections from being created.

Xav.. can you give any more details about this certificate thing?? sounds like a possible solution

Just use a 2000/2003 GPO to configure your network settings. This then greys out the options to the user, meaning they cant change anything. Dont forget to also disable regedit as you can get around the GPO that way.

edit. That said, we dont do that thought because the users do use the laptops we provide to access our corporate network over the internet from home.

That said, we dont do that thought because the users do use the laptops we provide to access our corporate network over the internet from home.

I hope via a VPN connection. Company computer use policies (paper documents - not GPOs) should specify what external connections the laptop users can use when out of the office. Virus scanning, etc should all be planned and implemented before allowing connections to non-corporate networks.