Can I make a local drive read only?

I'm trying to set up a few computers to use an apple server (10.6.8) as the only drive they can read and write to. Is there a feature built into the server or the macs themselves or even software to purchase that will allow me to make the local drive on the macs unable to be written to by the user logged in so that they have to write files to the server drive?

I would have thought that would have been an admin option when setting up a user account on the individual macs, but it doesn't seem that way. I was also looking at the software Deep Freeze. It sounds close to what I'm trying to do but not exactly.

Thanks!