kmosx: Classic - Security and ease of maintenance

I operate in a business environment and need reliability and security. I also need to use Classic daily. Unfortunately, I find that the Classic environment becomes corrupt faster than my OS X installs. I have encountered a few problems with this, including:

1. It is difficult to install Classic onto a computer that does not have classic already installed.

2. Once Classic is installed onto a computer that supports OS 9 booting, any security you have is out the window. (There ARE other ways of solving this problem other than the one that I am suggesting)

Solution:

Using a computer that already has a working version of Classic, create a Disk Image (using Disk Utility) of about 1 GB.

Using the OS 9.x install disk, install OS 9 onto that image. Then save it.

Then, make a copy of the image and lock the original. Call the original something that will identify it as a clean OS 9 install. Install whatever Classic programs that you use onto the copy, (the Applications need not be on the disk image) and archive that one using the same method. Do what ever tweaking you need to do on your working version and make another archive of it.

That final copy can then be distributed to any OS X computer that you have, and anytime it becomes corrupt, you can just replace it with the final archive.

You can also archive your "Applications (Mac OS 9)" folder in the same manner, and have an easy "Re install" of Classic Apps.

The security advantage to this is that the computers can not be booted into OS 9 if the Classic System Folder is on a disk image.

* do make sure that you have a sufficient # of OS 9 licenses to go around.