At Ease 2.0 for Workgroups: Shift-Key Security Loopholes
We are using At Ease 2.0 for Workgroups. We want a solution that will keep students from saving files and folders anywhere but to a specified folder on the Macintosh server (to cut down on security problems we were having).
At Ease was set up to use the server as the At Ease disk. Everything was working fine until a student held down the Shift key when powering up the Macintosh. At Ease came up with a dialog "The At Ease Preferences file is damaged, please contact your Administrator." The dialog box has a Cancel button in the lower right corner. Clicking on Cancel brings up the Finder with no protection to the local hard disk or the At Ease server that is mounted. This error dialog also comes up if there's any kind of an AppleTalk error, or if the server is under too heavy a load to support the request from the booting At Ease Macintosh.
Reformatting a couple of the drives with the newest HD SC Setup, reinstalling system software and applications, and At Ease, don't fix the problem. This shift key loophole is a big security issue.
If they remove the Finder from the System Folder, can we assume that no one can go to the Finder on those machines, including the administrator or teachers? Is there a utility that would work in this situation (no Finder), that the administrator or teachers could use to move the Finder out of the System Folder and back into it?
Users can no longer hold down the shift-key during startup to get into the finder when the At Ease disk is a server. At Ease for Workgroups version 2.0.1 and later have fixed this problem.