Kids tampering around with network files

Here at my school, I have some kids that are pretty good with computers. They may have built a little home network to play around with a bit and they have a good understanding of how computers and a network work. There are other students that, well, think they know it all, but really have no clue. We recently had a situation where a couple of files were deleted from a server which hosts a program that requires the students have Read/Write access to run properly. First of all, this is a ridiculous way to write a program, especially one that high school students are going to use, but I digress. All students need to be mapped to that network drive so it’s really easy for them to make changes to the files in an almost untrackable way. I needed to come up with a way to, at least, make it more difficult for them to get to those files. But how? After some Googling, I came across, at PC Tools, a method to make that network drive connection invisible to the user, but the program can still access it to function properly. It involves a simple registry hack and the creation of a DWORD value called “NoDrives.” After testing it out on a couple of machines to make sure it worked flawlessly, I pushed it to all 700 computers at my school. This saved me a lot of time and extra work. I no longer have to check that share constantly to make sure all of the files are there.

As for those couple of students, they are being dealt with as we speak…

You can find the instructions at PC Tools Software.

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