Preventing Software Theft at School
Articles and Tips: qna
01 Jul 2003
Q.
I have been bouncing around an idea at the middle school where I work. We allow the students to access our school network with a wireless access point in our library. This has been designed for those students who have their own notebook computers.
I think this technology is a good step towards the future, but I am concerned with our ZENworks for Desktops 3.2 applications being installed and taken home, which I realize is stealing, whether the students know it or not. Is there an easy way to prevent "foreign" notebooks from accessing our applications, or will we have to create and maintain a manual list or workstation group of our 300 workstations to limit access to those workstations only?
Sally Preventing Stolen Software
A.
Dear Sally: Here's one thought. Create a registry key, file or similar on each 'school' machine; make each application dependent on that feature being present. Also, lock down your workstations and servers.
To expand on this idea of using a registry key, perform the following: instead of having to push it down every time, use the feature in MS Sysprep. There is a key that can be pushed during the sysprep run called "OEMDuplicatorString." When Sysprep runs, it writes a user-defined value to HKLM\System\Setup\OemDuplicatorString.
We use this as version control to keep track of what version of our baseline image is on a desktop. It's in a location where a restricted user can't get to, and even an admin would have to know what they are looking for (and what your default key is) to be able to change it. This is simple, doesn't require reinventing the wheel, and it can be used for a lot of different things.
* Originally published in Novell AppNotes
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