after having had trouble with login-software for a long time, I finally
have found a program that seems to suit our needs:
Mac Administrator from HI-Resolution Software
http://www.hi-resolution.com/
Email: support@hi-resolution.com
This program does all of what you need, protection, login-logout, software
and printing audit (records who is running which program for how long, and
how many pages he prints etc) - all the records are directly imported into
Filemaker Pro for further analysis.
There is one flaw that I found with it:
It's a network program, therefore you need network connection and one Mac
(a SE 30 is sufficient) that you lock away and set up as MacAdmin Server.
All the other Macs (eg the CALIBUR or any analysis station) are Clients and
need to connect to the server Mac to get the information about Passwords,
Users etc. Therefore you have to run the server Mac all the time.
However the new version apparently now supports to verify Users over a Unix
Machine using their user-password setup, this would solve the problem for
me, then my >100 users could just use their mail login and password and
things would be very transparent... but I haven't tried it yet.
This might not be a problem for you if you don't have guys running their
samples at midnight or on the weekend...
Besides this the program is very nice, especially for people who have many
Macs to protect, with lot's of users (>100)... and in different rooms,
because you can configure all from the server, and over the network...
price is something like 80 $ (400 FF) per Mac protected.
They also make two other programs that might be better for your purpose.
WatchIt and MacPrefect... just have a look at their web site or email
them...
I also tried FileGuard but it has this stupid menu that allows the users to
lock the Mac (maybe this changed now, I didn't try the latest version),
therefore it was unusable for me...
Hope that helps. Of course would be nice if somebody would write a little
free program to do the job... (I thought to do so, but I don't have the
time right now...).
Cheers, Matthias
______________________________________________________________
Matthias Haury _/_/_/ _/_/_/ _/_/_/
Flowcytometry - Immunology _/ _/ _/ _/ _/
Institut Pasteur Paris _/ _/_/_/ _/_/_/
Email: mhaury@pasteur.fr _/ _/ _/
Tel: 33 (1) 40 61 31 29 _/_/_/ _/ _/
Fax: 33 (1) 45 68 86 39 INSTITUT PASTEUR PARIS
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