🚀 go-pugleaf

Norman Brooks <Norman@nbrooks.demon.co.uk> wrote:

> My daughter is the librarian at the local school, she has 3 Macs in the
> library, ( if the type is important I can find out, but 2 of them are
> fairly new). She needs to stop the kids from changing the settings,
> desktop colours,fonts etc etc. I know how to do this on pc's (using
> poledit etc) but not on Macs. Can anyone give advice, I would be
> grateful if you could possibly cc by e-mail, as I don't get a lot of
> chance to log on to usenet and I would hate to miss any advice given.

To start with, she could experiment with removing control panels, or
perhaps just taking the Control Panels alias off the Apple Menu. If the
kids are messing around in the System Folder (deleting extensions etc.),
Apple have provided a basic Protect System Folder option in the General
Controls control panel. Otherwise there is (or at least used to be) a
product called MacPrefect which allowed the administator to lock the
System Folder, prevent shift-key (extension off) startups, etc. They
used to have it on some machines at my college; a web search should
reveal if it is still around.

In addition, Peter N Lewis had a product called Assimilator, which
changed the contents of the HD back to a standard setting (stored on a
server somewhere) each time the Mac was switched on. That allows users
to mess around as much as they like, however anything they've done or
left on the HD is lost when the Mac is restarted. It does require a
network (I think), but may be useful. Try <http://www.stairways.com/>.

Hope some of that is of help. This is all done from the memory of how
they used to try to protect the machines at the college I attended, and
how I used to get round it...


Cheers,

Mark

uk.comp.sys.mac added to the followups...

-- 
Mark Etherington
mark@roxley.demon.co.uk