[olePigeon]

Anyone know something about Forth? I was wondering if it'd be possible to put in a custom welcome message in Open Firmware before it boots. I wanted to put an OF password on my laptop. There's been a rash of thefts at my school and I just wanted to make sure. Put up something like:


If you see this message, this laptop was either lost or stolen.
This laptop has protected by a HARDWARE password and will not
operate in any fashion without the password.
Please call (xxx) xxx xxx or contact your local police station.
Name, Address, Etc.

[theolein]

That is a two part question. Firstly, to put the info you stated above in the OF and make it appear, you would need to do the following:

In the terminal, enter:

Code:
ole-pigeon$ sudo nvram oem-banner?=true

And then the terminal will ask you for your password:

Code:
password:

Which you enter.
Then, you enter the following:

Code:
ole-pigeon$ sudo nvram oem-banner="Ole Pigeon warning message, etc"

It can ONLY and MUST BE one line, i.e. no line breaks.

You can boot into OF, by pressing Cmd-Opt-O-F on boot to see the above line.

The second part of setting your OF password can either be done in the terminal, in OF or with a utility supplied by Apple, or with a 3rd party utility.
Here is a very good article explaining on how to do it right and where you can get the utilities:
http://archive.macosxlabs.org/docume...ity/intro.html

P.S. If you do it in OF, I suggest you set the security mode to "full"

Remember that this OF password can fairly easily be disabled, but there's a 50/50 chance that the thief won't be tech savy and know how to do it, so it's better than nothing. Looking after your Notebook is a better idea.

Another idea, and possibly better, is to set a boot script in OSX to automatically page a server to which you have log access everytime your Mac starts up or set up a cronjob that pages the server every 5 minutes or so. That way is more crafty and doesn't alert a thief to the fact that it's happening, and you can trace your stolen laptop via the IP address. It's what I've done on my Macs.

[olePigeon]

Just read up on removing the password... just adding or removing RAM? Hmm. I just hope the thief is a moron.

Thanks for the reply. I'll give it a whirl.