Re: Grub Scripting

[Colin D Bennett]

Chris Umphress wrote on Friday 08 May 2009:
> We'll overwrite the boot loader and restore the partition table if it
> was destroyed. That would be handled from a custom, bootable live-CD
> or thumbdrive. This is going to be used on laptops that are lent out
> and it is one more way that we can try to force people to return them
> without sending the police out. This is why we need it automated.

It seems like just disabling the GRUB boot menu entries would be a better 
method than actually wiping the MBR/partition table/etc.  A somewhat robust 
way (so that it's not trivial for a user to set back the BIOS date after the 
system has locked them out) would be to set a flag in the GRUB boot partition 
that indicates the system is to be locked down.  Then whenever that flag is 
set, instead of using the normal boot setup, your GRUB script displays a 
message to the user like "Your usage period of this computer has expired. 
Please return it to [your org. here]."

Regards,
Colin