jallred@bbn.com (John Allred) (10/05/89)
A friend of mine at an ivy-covered university would like to control access to his lab's macs, by requiring users to log in. The log in portion works well now. The big hole in this scheme is someone booting off of a floppy. So, what my friend would like to do is something relatively easy and not too dangerous to keep the system from mounting the hard disk. After a proper login has been received, then the log in program could fix the hard disk and mount it. I have scanned the Tech Notes, Inside Macintosh, and the Q&A Stack, but there's no information on this topic. Any ideas out there? ____ John Allred BBN Advanced Simulation (jallred@bbn.com) "Walkies!" -- B. Woodhouse
steve@cpdaux.UUCP (Steve Lemke) (10/07/89)
In article <46506@bbn.COM> jallred@vax.bbn.com (John Allred) writes: }A friend of mine at an ivy-covered university would like to control access }to his lab's macs, by requiring users to log in. The log in portion works }well now. } }The big hole in this scheme is someone booting off of a floppy. So, what my }friend would like to do is something relatively easy and not too dangerous }to keep the system from mounting the hard disk. After a proper login has }been received, then the log in program could fix the hard disk and mount it. Tell him just to site license Disk Lock from Fifth Generation Systems (the Suitcase people). It is very secure, because it modifies the SCSI driver on the disk. Even booting from a floppy will not give you access to the hard drive without a password (when the machine is turned on, even before any drive starts to boot up, the SCSI driver asks for the password). There are some disk locking schemes out there that are not very secure since all you have to do is run the program that came with the disk and re-install the driver (thus not erasing the data, but erasing the lock program). Disk Lock will not give in to such tactics. Reinstalling the original SCSI driver will only give you access to an "empty" disk - not the one with all the goodies (data/programs) in it. Although I'm not sure how, from what I understand, it would still be possible to reinstall Disk Lock, enter the proper password, and re-gain access to the drive. Sounds pretty secure to me. A lot of time was put into the development of Disk Lock, and a lot of effort by beta testers to make this a solid program. Check it out. I'm of no relation to the author or the company - I was just a beta tester for about six months. -- ----- Steve Lemke ------------------- "MS-DOS (OS/2, etc.) - just say no!" ----- Internet: cpdaux!steve@apple.com GEnie: LEMKE ----- Or try: apple!cpdaux!steve CompuServe: 73627,570 ----- Quote: "What'd I go to college for?" "You had fun, didn't you?"