Where I work, we have employees who use (in decreasing order of popularity) Mac OS, Windows, and Linux as their desktop computers. We’ve deployed a large, complex remote administration / MDM application for managing the Mac OS and Windows desktops. It’s big and complicated and difficult to maintain. It does much more than we will probably ever need it to do, but because it’s so large and complicated, we frequently find it difficult to get it to do the relatively simple things we actually do need.
When we set out to identify and deploy an equivalent solution for our Linux desktops, we wanted to avoid the problems we ran with Mac OS and Windows. In particular, we didn’t want our Linux MDM to be so large and complicated that we would need to spend a huge amount of time configuring it to do what we need and not do what we don’t. Furthermore, we give our employees as much leeway as possible in technology choices, so we didn’t want to require the use of a specific Linux distribution.
Given those considerations, we ended up deciding to write our own Linux MDM solution, which we’ve called PenguinDome. We’ve open-sourced it here. Share and enjoy!
