Comments on: The Kiosk Series — Part Three — Microsoft SteadyState vs Group Policies

By: Andrew

Andrew — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 02:18:56 +0000

As an aside Steady state offers a group policy template. Install SteadyState on the machine you use for group policies and you can import the template into group policy. It has many of the same options and doesn’t require as much fiddling with obscure settings. (Registry Keys and such)

By: Andrew

Andrew — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 20:18:56 +0000

By: creeva

creeva — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 13:02:15 +0000

To be honest — I haven’t really attempted to actually remove steady state — on the machines I employ these on I would just do a system wipe. If I get a chance I’ll attempt to go through and try it and see how it goes and what I find.

By: Paul

Paul — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 07:21:17 +0000

I want to remove all traces of SteadyState regarding logon especially. Also my SystemRestore no longer functions. I removed every file with regedit. But it’s still present. OS is XP Pro.

By: Creeva

Creeva — Mon, 19 May 2008 13:32:29 +0000

I haven’t looked at Netkey’s solution. I will be looking them up now and seeing what they have to offer, thanks for the tip.

By: Creeva

Creeva — Mon, 19 May 2008 13:32:29 +0000

I haven’t looked at Netkey’s solution. I will be looking them up now and seeing what they have to offer, thanks for the tip.

By: Ben Cecka

Ben Cecka — Sun, 18 May 2008 06:18:52 +0000

Have you or your team looked at the platforms offered by companies like Netkey? They offer content distribution and quite a comprehensive suite of security and deployment tools. We’ve been looking very hard at them for some time during our project but haven’t made up our minds yet as to whether to implement their software or not with our kiosks.

By: Ben Cecka

Ben Cecka — Sun, 18 May 2008 06:18:52 +0000

By: Creeva

Creeva — Thu, 01 May 2008 22:54:55 +0000

I still have to do 3 more parts on this series — might get another part done this weekend. That being said, at work we talked to MS on a conference call and we are partially implementing one of their solutions which is a mixture of GPO stuff, and steadystate (at least on the drawing board for right now).

To automatically login in a user there is a registry entry that you can put in the user name and passwords and that will cache it for you and auto login. The problem with using steadystate with user accounts and auto login is that user accounts must be local and not domain accounts, and the session timer makes absolutely no sense with auto login.

By: Creeva

Creeva — Thu, 01 May 2008 22:54:55 +0000

By: Ben Cecka

Ben Cecka — Thu, 01 May 2008 22:39:00 +0000

Thanks so much for the work you’ve put into this series. I’m currently working on a similar project with a retail customer facing kiosk. This contrast between SteadyState (which I just ran across this afternoon) and GPO was just what I was looking for.

This is probably a very simple question, but what methods are you looking at (or are you) to log in a restricted domain user account on startup?

By: Ben Cecka

Ben Cecka — Thu, 01 May 2008 22:39:00 +0000

This is probably a very simple question, but what methods are you looking at (or are you) to log in a restricted domain user account on startup?