Open source laptop fleet management

Organizations and educational institutions increasingly rely on fleets of laptops used both on-site and remotely. Managing these devices securely and efficiently is traditionally achieved using proprietary ecosystems such as Microsoft Active Directory and Microsoft Intune. However, these solutions often require expensive licenses and may limit flexibility, transparency, and customization.

The objective of this internship is to study, integrate, and evaluate open source alternatives for enterprise laptop fleet management. The project will focus on replacing common Windows ecosystem functionalities such as:

  • central users management
  • user authentication, including offline authentication while traveling
  • roaming profiles
  • Active Directory services

The student will design and implement a prototype infrastructure demonstrating how these open source technologies can provide a secure and scalable alternative for managing a fleet of Linux laptops.

Goal

The goal of this project is to design and implement an open source infrastructure for managing a fleet of laptops, including centralized identity management, authentication, configuration management, and remote administration capabilities.

The student will evaluate several existing open source solutions, compare their features and limitations, and develop deployment and management scenarios suitable for educational or enterprise environments.

Expected outcome

source code and deployment scripts on our GitLab server infrastructure-as-code configuration files and documentation 1 blog post 1 poster a project report documenting the architecture, deployment process, and evaluation results

Required skills

To start this project you should have some knowledge of:

  • Linux system administration
  • networking fundamentals
  • scripting or programming experience
  • Git version control
  • basic cybersecurity concepts

Knowledge of the following technologies is considered a plus:

  • LDAP or identity management systems
  • virtualization or containerization

Conditions

Applicant’s country of origin must be a member of EU or NATO

Tools and technologies

To achieve this project, you will use following tools and technologies:

  • Linux-based operating systems
  • identity management solutions such as FreeIPA or Samba AD
  • automation and configuration management tools such as Ansible
  • Git to manage your source code
  • GitLab to implement Continuous Integration (CI)
  • containerization and virtualization technologies
  • monitoring and remote management tools

Possible technologies explored during the project include:

  • System Security Services Daemon (SSSD)
  • Ansible
  • OpenLDAP
  • NFS and kerberos
  • FreeIPA
  • Samba
  • GLPI
  • MeshCentral

Interested?

Contact us