Re: Grub Scripting

[Javier Martín]

El vie, 08-05-2009 a las 13:16 +0200, Vladimir 'phcoder' Serbinenko
escribió:
> 
> 
> On Fri, May 8, 2009 at 9:48 AM, Chris Umphress <address@hidden>
> wrote:
>         Hey,
>         
>         We have some computers that need a boot loader to
>         self-destruct at the
>         end of a school year. In order to accomplish this we would
>         like to use
>         Grub scripting. From what I have been able to find, the
>         support is
>         incomplete and we would have to write the code to
>         self-destruct
>         somehow.
> Why do you need this? Remember that destroying bootloader leaves all
> the data intact. Furthermore it looks like that your goal is to
> restrict a legitimate freedom. I can't be sure of it since I don't
> know more details but don't expect us to help you to restrict
> freedom. 
It does not only leave all the data intact, but also most computers
nowadays allow selecting the boot device with a key press on boot, plus
booting from USB drives and/or memory cards. Put those things together
and your scheme becomes useless. I think it's way simpler to just lock
the computer room at the end of the school year.

The opposite extreme would be to implement an actual hard drive nuking
at the end of the school year (with DBAN for example, www.dban.org),
which would not be that much of a problem if your computers are similar
enough to keep just a handful of disk images handy to restore them to
life next September. However, implementing a self-destruct scheme would,
even if possible, be risky - just suppose that the BIOS date gets
somehow changed: bang! you're dead.

-- 
-- Lazy, Oblivious, Recurrent Disaster -- Habbit

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