There's been a lot of grumbling among my academic friends about how hard it is to protect a Macintosh in a public lab. Apparently the best solution so far is to use Suitcase II to load DAs into the Apple Menu and to make the entire System Folder invisible. What they would all like though, is the ability to boot the Mac remotely over an Ethernet network. A company called Mauswerks has a product that can do just that. BootToob, as it's called, replaces a ROM on an Apple or Asante Ethernet card with one that creates a RAM disk at startup, loads the boot image into that RAM disk over the network, disconnects from the network, and continues to boot. A number of Macs can share the same image file, which must be stored on a Mac running MacTCP on the network. Right now, BootToob retails for $139 for one Mac and one server, and $995 for ten Macs. It requires a Mac II-class machine with a minimum of 2 MB, but Mauswerks plans versions of the BootToob for the SE/30, the LC, the IIsi, and SCSI devices (I guess that means the Nodem - I haven't heard of any other SCSI-based Ethernet adapters). Of course, Apple is certainly working on this sort of thing too, but who knows how long it might take for them to get a product out the door.

Mauswerks -- 614/294-7300

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MacWEEK -- 29-Jan-91, Vol. 5, #4, pg. 15