On Fri, May 8, 2009 at 3:44 PM, Colin D Bennett <co...@gibibit.com> wrote: > Chris Umphress wrote on Friday 08 May 2009: >> We'll overwrite the boot loader and restore the partition table if it >> was destroyed. That would be handled from a custom, bootable live-CD >> or thumbdrive. This is going to be used on laptops that are lent out >> and it is one more way that we can try to force people to return them >> without sending the police out. This is why we need it automated. > > It seems like just disabling the GRUB boot menu entries would be a better > method than actually wiping the MBR/partition table/etc. A somewhat robust > way (so that it's not trivial for a user to set back the BIOS date after the > system has locked them out) would be to set a flag in the GRUB boot partition > that indicates the system is to be locked down. Then whenever that flag is > set, instead of using the normal boot setup, your GRUB script displays a > message to the user like "Your usage period of this computer has expired. > Please return it to [your org. here]."
That would be a simpler solution. By destroying the partition table we are ensuring that a Windows XP CD with the "fixmbr" command won't return the system to working order. A lot of kids are clever enough to pull that off. It is a slippery slope for how much is too much work for the actual results. -- Chris Umphress <http://www.epicvoyage.org> _______________________________________________ Grub-devel mailing list Grub-devel@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/grub-devel
