🚀 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.

I have had to deal with exactly the same problems since I run a network
of Macs at a Hostel in Central London. I will share some of the tricks
I came up with to prevent tampering with the general system settings
as well as other measures (somebody else may find some of it useful)...

1) Take the control panel alias out of the Apple Menu and hide the
   Control Panels folder, as well as the Extensions folder (using
   ResEdit, or some such utility) - the system will work perfectly
   well without being able to see them from the Finder. Also, you can
   hide the System file and the Finder (though you may well have to
   boot from a floppy to hide Finder) - this prevents them from being
   removed from the System Folder by 'accident', to worry the next
   person that tries to boot up.
   Note that you should keep a copy of the control panels on floppy.
   They can be used fine from there; so you can alter the settings
   if required without having to make the Control Panels visible.

2) There may be some control panels that are useful for people to
   fiddle with - eg. I have some Koreans that want to type in Korean,
   so I allow them to access the Keyboards control panel. The way to
   do this is to move these to the System Folder before you hide the
   Control Panels folder - they should work fine from there. It will
   also be useful to have a Control Panel-like replacement folder in
   the Apple Menu which contains aliases to any of these available
   control panels.

3) If you're using OS 7.5 or newer you can turn on System Folder
   protection - this is not perfect, but it does prevent anyone from
   dragging items in or out of the System Folder. Similarly, there is
   an Applications Folder protection (you need a folder on the top
   level of your drive called Applications).

4) Turn on file sharing and set the sharing on your folders so that
   they 'cannot be moved, renamed or deleted'.

5) Try locking your applications and their preference files from the
   Get Info window. You may find that some applications don't like this,
   but a good number will be OK unless you try to change their prefs.

6) Use a utility such as ResEdit to lock names of files/aliases/folders.

7) Use ResEdit to lock the resources of applications and their prefs.
   Same things apply as in no.5 - but you might get away with just
   locking resources when it does not like the whole file being locked.

None of the above are foolproof - but they will prevent little
'accidents', and only someone that has a pretty good idea about Macs
(and access to ResEdit) is likely to overcome them.

Of course, if you don't want to allow a full Finder interface, you can
go for 'At Ease' - this requires an admin. password to get in and
change settings.

Hope that helps (someone)...

======================================
  Adrian Umpleby
  adrian@ic.ac.uk
  http://wrench.et.ic.ac.uk/adrian/
======================================