Picture this: a lab of 30 new iMacs running OS 9.0. All are connected to an Ethernet network. The only other funky extension is Foolproof, and I'm not above thinking that Foolproof and/or OS 9.0 are the problems.

There is a growing number of computers in the lab (although not all of them) that will display as many as 15 logon screens when the machine boots up in the AM. When you cancel one, another pops up. And to make matters even worse, sometimes the name that appears there belongs to a person that NEVER sits there.

The only way to complete the bootup process is to sit at each machine and Esc out of each screen as it appears.

Does anyone have an idea what is happening and how to fix it? OS 9.1 is on the way, but the teacher insists on running Foolproof. It would seem odd, however, that this would occur on only a fraction - perhaps a third - of the computers in the room. If it was an issue with OS 9.0 you'd think that it would effect ALL the machines.

[lothar56]

it isn't foolproof (i hate that damn program it's on the comps here)
the logon screens that come up come up because the person sat there at least once to log on. After typing in their name and password the disk that they wanted to choose came up, and they clicked the small check box on the right saying they wanted to automatically connect at startup, thinking it meant to connect to that disk.
All you need to do is log in in their name and uncheck that box.

I have that same problem on some of the comps here.

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Men don't leave the toilet seat up, WOMEN LEAVE IT DOWN!

That's how I used to do that, as well. However, when we sit down at those computers and log on as that person, the box is NOT checked. Not for ANY of them. We even tried logging as as ourselves, checking the box, logging off, logging back on and unchecking the box. That usually does it. Nope. So, we trashed the appleshare prefs file thinking that was keeping track of it somehow. Nope. We zapped the PRAM. No good. We rebuilt the desktop. No good. We have done all the things that our years of experience would tell us to do. Nothing seems to work. The ONLY thing I can think of is that OS 9.0 has a bug in it that causes this to happen. Where the information is stored I have no idea. We're awaiting the upgrade to 9.1 to see if that stops the problem.

Thanks for your input.

[Paul Crawford]

Hi again J.,

The AppleShare client auto-logon mechanism has changed somewhat in Mac OS 9. The AppleShare Prep pref-file is no longer as important as it used to be, and there's now a new Servers subfolder (in the System Folder) which holds aliases to servers for auto-logon. (For details, please see Apple's TIL articles (#60544) Mac OS 9: What Is The Servers Folder In The System Folder? and (#17697) AppleShare Volumes: Disabling Automatic Log On.)

To permanently stop the unwanted auto-logons, try removing the corresponding aliases from the System Folder's Servers subfolder. [Although, I'm not sure how the strange ones (specifying impossible user-names) got created. As lothar56 suggested above, those users might have done a one-time logon at some point and then forgot about it.]

Regards,

--Paul