root@ec.uwa.oz.au (Operator) (06/30/91)
I don't know if this has been done before, or if someone has done something similar but I thought I post this idea before I implement it and see what types of responses I get The idea comes from the hassles we have in that students in out lab are always writing files onto our harddisks and there a hassel to get rid of or they actually change files on the harddisk. What I though to implement was a system whereby the profile of the harddisk was known so that only permitted files and directories were allowed to exist on the hard disk and files had known checksums. If files or directories were changed or deleted it could copy another across from a read-only disk under nfs. I thaught what was needed was a program which will create a profile file of a 'good' harddisk with all the checksums for the files, and a program which would run occasionally which compared the two and made the hard disk equivelent to the profile. It would then be possible to update software on any machine just by changing the central profile. It would also would be extended to having some logic such as all files in a work or temp directory could be ignored and each machine could, if necessary have a different profile. I suspect someone has already done this and maybe someone can point me to it, otherwise I guess its back to the good ole pc to hack out some code.... Thanks for any comments, Please email me as I won't be reading this group for a while... Christoph Uloth University of Western Australia chris@ecel.uwa.oz.au