floppy disk access on public access

[Brian D. Jennison]

If you are running Win95 or NT Workstation on the client side, you might consider implementing policies and profiles.  We allow the downloading of files to the floppy drives on our public Web-Access PCs. Using policies, we can control which executables can be run on those machines.  Right now, only Netscape.exe and our telnet executable can be launched.  So any time someone wants to run an executable other than those (including launching a virus from diskette), policies will notify them that the "operation is restricted...".  We also set a BIOS password so that if patrons try to reboot the PC, they will need a password which only the Librarians know!  This prevents patrons from booting from diskettes. 
Hope that helps some,

Brian D. Jennison
Pikes Peak Library District
bjenn at pcisys.net


-----Original Message-----
From:	Volker Henze [SMTP:henze at dbf.ddb.de]
Sent:	Tuesday, February 17, 1998 7:31 AM
To:	Multiple recipients of list
Subject:	Re: floppy disk access on public access

> We are becoming more aware that users may have legitimate reasons to download 
> files to their floppy discs - but we don't want to compromise our network 
> security by allowing the potential of recalcitrant users  uploading a virus to 
> our network or re booting the pc and running programs from a discette..
> 
> How have other libraries handled this ?

Our public access PC in our reading room are linked to a special 
diskette station to which so called export files can be sent for 
downloading on floppy discs provided by us. So while we disabled the 
all floppy disc drives of the public access PC's as well we offer our 
users the chance of downloading any file on a virtual disc first. In 
a second step this or these file may be sent to the diskette station 
and downloaded on diskette(s) that can then be taken home, for a 
small fee, by the way. 
********************************************************
                      Volker Henze
                Die Deutsche Bibliothek
                    Datenverarbeitung
                      Adickesallee 1
               D-60322 Frankfurt am Main
                        GERMANY
                Email: henze at dbf.ddb.de
                 Tel.:  +49-69-1525-1703
                 Fax:   +49-69-1525-1799
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