Password for specific functions

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Level 1

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Password for specific functions

Hi

I have a somewhat odd problem I hope you may assist me with. I work at a high school as music teachers and we have a small studio setup with a Mac Pro and a semi-pro ProTools setup as well as other music software. We use it for our classes but also lend to a few other users. Now, the thing is... it is a pretty expensive setup and we don't people messing with it but we also need for it to be easily accessible for the guests who come by. At the moment, we only have one account with everything installed onto it and if someone wants to use Logic, Ableton or another of the programs, they have to login to that account. This means that we can't have a password protected login but is there a way to make the system require the password for specific functions? For example, software installation as the main issue but smaller things such as the mouse scrolling directions or changing the screen background?

We may go with a multiple user setup at some point but the last time I tried this, every program not installed with OS X needed a new license, which we don't have and can't afford.

Hope, you can help me out 🙂

Mac Pro, OS X Mavericks (10.9)

Posted on Sep 3, 2015 11:52 PM

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Answer 1

BobHarris

Level 9

53,117 points

Sep 4, 2015 6:15 AM in response to Simski

I would suggest creating a 2nd "Admin" account.

Once you have an Admin account created and VERIFIED it has full 'Admin' rights, then and ONLY THEN, remove 'Admin' from the original account.

You can have the system auto boot into the original account, and if you have Fast User Switching enabled, you can easily switch to the new Admin account, or you can just logout of the original account, and then be prompted for the account to login to, and select the new Admin account.

Since the original account does not have 'admin' privileges, it should not be able to install software that needs to be put in specific protect Folders (they can still download an app that comes in a .dmg file and run it from any folder they have write access to, but they should not be able to add things to the Applications folder.

If you have software licenses that are per user account, then install them via the original user, but when prompted for authorization you enter the username/password for the admin account to complete the installation.

You can use the new 'Admin' account to implement parental controls on the original account that that it is a 'Standard' user.

You can prevent some system preferences changes via System Preferences -> Security -> General -> Advanced -> [X] Require an administrator password to access system-wide preferences (the admin account will need to click on the padlock in the lower left corner to get to "Advanced".

These steps may not protect your system from everything, but it should cover a lot of ground.

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Answer 2

Simski Author

Level 1

0 points

Sep 4, 2015 6:33 AM in response to BobHarris

Thank you for answering. I guess this might cover most of the problems: add a new admin-account and make the original one a 'supervised' one.

The reason I am having this problem is that I tried to create a guest account but that account could not access the programs from the admin because it needed serial numbers almost everything. This is a general problem with public institutions - if a previous teacher leaves without telling the successor where to find serial numbers, codes etc., then we run into this problem. So this was supposed to have been my original solution, but because I don't have all the codes and numbers, it would have meant losing some of the programs.

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