[WEB4LIB] Locking Down Mac OS 9

[Randy Souther]

If you open your public account in the multiple users control panel, and set
the "kind of account" to "panels," then the preferences access will be
limited to just a couple of options regarding how the panels are displayed.

There is a new product called "Rewind," which seems to work on the same
principles as "Deep Freeze" on Windows. But whereas Deep Freeze restores the
system configuration on every reboot, Rewind restores the configuration only
if you tell it to, and you can choose to restore it to any previous
configuration on any previous date.  (I haven't tried it yet, but I've been
reading up on it). So you could set up your Mac with a clean configuration
on Dec 4, 2000, and the next time something is out of whack, tell Rewind to
return to the Dec 4 configuration. This wouldn't be very practical in a
large lab, but unlike Deep Freeze, Rewind seems to be aimed at the general
public--individual users, individual workstations: if your system crashes,
just rewind to when it was okay, etc.
http://www.poweronsoftware.com/rewind/

--
Randy Souther
Reference Technology Librarian
Gleeson Library | Geschke Learning Resource Center
University of San Francisco

Email:  southerr at usfca.edu
Phone: (415) 422-5388

Michael Dargan wrote:

> I'm fussing around with MacOS9 which I'd like to use on some of our
> public Internet terminals.  I've created a "public" login with access
> only to the web browser and little else.  However, I see that patrons can
> still gain access to the preferences which control the appearance of
> their session.  While this doesn't cause a huge amount of trouble the
> appearance of the computer does change and that's a little confusing to
> patrons.
>
> Does any one have a way to prevent access to the user's preferences?  Or,
> at least come up with a way to restore the original preferences upon
> restart?  Thanks.
>
> ---
> Michael J. Dargan                               office: 319 291 4496
> Technical Systems Administrator                    fax: 319 291 6736
> Waterloo and Cedar Falls Public Libraries         Waterloo, IA 50701