Educause Security Discussion mailing list archives

Windows Subsystem for Linux - Anyone using it?


From: Patrick McElhinney <patrick.mcelhinney () NEWCASTLE EDU AU>
Date: Fri, 15 Nov 2019 06:28:20 +0000

Hi All,

We've had some requests from our researchers to enable WSL on some of our Windows 10 devices.  Most of our users don't 
have admin rights to activate this themselves, hence the requests coming to IT to action.  Whilst the subsystem 
operates within the existing user context, I'm trying to wrap my head around whether, and if, we need to further harden 
the installed Linux environment, in line with the CIS based hardening we do on the underlying Windows OS.  There are 
also questions about how to managing patching or other operational tasks in a centralised fashion.  One of our problems 
is that our standard Linux deployments are RHEL, but the go-to Linux kernel for Windows 10 is Ubuntu.  To even 
entertain centralised management, we'd need to look at spinning up something like SUSE Manager, as we couldn't use our 
existing RHEL Satellite platform.

I'm wondering if any other University's has enabled WSL on their fleet, and have you ventured down the route of 
hardening, and centrally managing configuration or patching of the environment?  If so, are there any tips, trick or 
online resources that you can share?

With Thanks,  Patrick



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