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From: mcmac@hubcap.clemson.edu (Scott McAlister)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.apps,comp.sys.mac.hardware
Subject: hard drive write-protection?
Message-ID: <13100@hubcap.clemson.edu>
Date: 13 Feb 91 21:39:01 GMT
Organization: Clemson University, Clemson, SC
Lines: 26


Sorry, I know there was some recent discussion on this, but I didn't pay
attention to it earlier.

Let me describe the situation:
I supervise a Mac Lab here at Clemson and we have a problem of students
putting unauthorized software on the hard drives, and they sometimes make
it difficult to find the software (hiding within folders). It hasn't been 
much of problem having the lab operators go thru each folder to find the
software, but now it is.

What I want to do is to partition the hard drives, with one partition
containing all of our legitimate software, write-protected.  And the other
partition open for the students to save to.  This way, just one large dump
to the trash can deletes all of the unauthorized stuff.   

I have just looked at DiskLock, by Brian Bechtel, but it locks the startup 
disk.  I want to avoid this since most of the programs today are writing
pref files and such to the system folder, which I believe will create some
problems if the disk is read-only.

Any ideas will be appreciated and I'm not limited to public domain software,
so commercial will be fine.

Scott McAlister      mcmac@hubcap.clemson.edu
Clemson University