HACKER Q&A
📣 elric

Endpoint Management for Linux?


I manage the infrastructure for a small software company (~20 software engineers), while being one of those software engineers myself. Most of us are using Linux. Some of our clients are $megacorps and they have all kinds of compliance requirements regarding our internal infrastructure. Some of them are sensible (full disk encryption), others are a bit silly or overly specific (gnome screensaver must be enabled .. but I don't use gnome?).

This wasn't a big deal when there were only 5 engineers. But now that we've grown to 20, this is sort of becoming a chore. I don't want to spend time checking whether people have lock screens with passwords, or whether they actually set up full disk encryption correctly.

I'm aware of endpoint management tools like JAMF for macOS, but I don't know of any in the Linux space. I'm not even entirely sure what features I would be looking for exactly -- so any advice in this area is welcome. I guess at a minimum it would need a reporting function which tells me whether things like full disk encryption are enabled, selinux is running etc. I'm not terribly interested in features like remote wipe, remote software installs or even remediation of compliance issues at this point, but those might be nice if we continue to grow.

Just to clarify: I'm only concerned with engineers' laptops, in this case, not servers or phones or anything else.

Thanks for any advice!

~ elric, wearer of many hats


  👤 hugofromboss Accepted Answer ✓
Shameless plug: https://github.com/zercurity/zercurity it'll provide you with a compliance dashboard for things like disk encryption, selinux etc via osquery.

👤 daenney
You can get pretty far with osquery, and it’s extendable for the things you might be missing.

It’s also usable in a way that doesn’t violate folks’ privacy. It doesn’t do stuff like actively track what you’re doing, logging keys etc.


👤 moretta
If you're using Ubuntu, Ubuntu Landscape I've found is the only thing that comes close without creating too much yourself. But even that requires adding scripts to check compliance, so scripted osquery might be better if you just want reporting only