[Dex4788]

Just got a Macbook this past weekend and I'm a Mac newbie, so it's been a lil' confusing. I want to set up a Guest account for others to use, but I also want to customize it so they won't be able to access/save particular files (like video). I just wanna allow basic things like browsing the net and word processing.

Can anyone be kind enough to tell me how exactly I can go about in doing this? Any help is greatly appreciated.

[Laurence]

Go to the Apple Menu and choose System Preferences... Select the Accounts Pref Pane and click the + to add a user. Enter the user name and password and click "Create Account" Then under the Parental Controls tab configure whatever you want to allow this account to do.

This will prevent the user from opening any applications other than the ones you specify.

To prevent the user from saving things to the HD is a bit harder... The non-admin user will only be able to write to their own user directory at /Users/username and all sub-folders of that location. If you really want them to be prevented from saving files to their own directory you would have to change the permissions on their directory to prevent write access. This would likely cause them other issues as Safari wouldn't be able to write its preferences or bookmarks to the appropriate location as these are user-specific. You could selectively allow write access to the specific locations that the allowed apps needed access to, but then a savvy user would be able to save his personal files in the preferences folder as well and that would defeat the purpose.

I think a better way of dealing with this is to just let the guest account save stuff to their own directory and not worry about it. Drive space is cheap and you can always just go in and delete the "stuff" in the guest account if they abuse the space. You could even make a cron job that would delete all the files in the guest account's documents/movies/music folder once a week or something like that.

There are no easy ways to set up disk quotas in the client version of Mac OS X.

[Dex4788]

Thanks for the help. One more question though.

How do I set up the automatic job of deleting all files within the guest directory like you mentioned?

[Laurence]

the command to delete the files would be

sudo rm -r /Users/<username>/Documents/*
sudo rm -r /Users/<username>/Movies/*
sudo rm -r /Users/<username>/Music/*
etc...

to make it run once a month/week/etc... you add it to the system crontab, although maybe a better way to do it would be to add it to the startup items so that it would delete the contents of the folders every boot??

to add it to the system crontab you need to edit the file /etc/crontab

I would just do a google search for 'Mac OS X how to use cron crontab' or something like that. There are many options available for scheduling.

To make it happen on every launch you need to create a "startup item"
The easiest way to do this is to make a copy of one of the Apple startup items.. /System/Library/IFCStart is a good one because its simple... just make a copy of the folder and place it in /Library/Startup Items and then edit the IFCStart file and put the new commands into the text file. The text file needs to have the exact same name as the enclosing folder for it to work. For more information do a search for "Launch Services" or "Startup Items" at www.macosxhints.com or google or ??

Actually you might want to just search www.versiontracker.com for something that will do this type of thing with a gui.