This section provides some technical information about the operation of MacPassword‚Ñ¢ and should be read by anyone desiring technical information about some of the features.
Changing Sounds in “!MacPassword™ Sounds” file
As discussed above, MacPassword™ will play a variety of sounds during system Startup and Shutdown. These sounds are stored as ‘snd’ resources in a file called “!MacPassword™ Sounds”. In order to change these sounds, you will need to create or gather sounds from somewhere and use ResEdit or some other tool (SoundEdit which comes with MacRecorder™ from Farallon is good too) to install these new sounds in place of the ones that come with MacPassword™. The four ‘snd’ resources are referred to by name from within MacPassword™ so all you have to do is supply resources with the same name and MacPassword™ will play them for you. Their names and when they are played are as follows:
Name When Played
“MPOK” Upon successful logon
“MPNotOK” Upon unsuccessful logon
“MPGuest” Upon guest logon
“MPShutdown” At Shutdown
Note: Their resource ID numbers are meaningless (ie. they can be anything) but they do need to be marked as “Purgeable”.
Discussion of Virus Protection
Viruses are a big subject these days. It seems that every time we turn around, a new one springs up. The Macintosh community has responded with a variety of tools to prevent and detect viruses. Most of these are quite good. I felt that virus protection falls quite nicely under hard disk security so I’ve added a very powerful protection system to MacPassword™. This system is an extension to the kind of protection found in Vaccine™. In it’s default mode, it checks for intrusion by all the known viruses. This is a very complete protection and will protect against attack by any kind of virus activities. The list of viruses that MacPassword™ knows about in particular are:
Troubles with Partitioning Software and Hard Disk Drives
The Macintosh system Startup program loads INIT files in alphabetical order by name. The reason I’ve named the MacPassword™ file “!MacPassword™” is that the “!” comes before all other letters and subsequently, MacPassword™ will be loaded first. This allows MacPassword™ to check your password before any other INITs (like debuggers, etc) get started.
This usually works out great. However, in some special cases this can cause a problem. Particularly if you have a hard disk drive that needs a special INIT file loaded before it can be mounted. The problem is that it will be loaded after “!MacPassword™” and therefore the MacPassword™ unprotection routines won’t recognize it as a ‘legal’ hard disk drive during Startup. If you had asked MacPassword™ to protect that hard disk drive during Shutdown, you now find that it seemingly can’t be unprotected! The same situation can be applied to partitioning software (such as that sold as HD Partition in the SUM package from Symantec). If the INIT code for the partitioning software is loaded after “!MacPassword™”, then MacPassword™ can’t recognize the folders within the partition at Startup and therefore can’t unprotect anything you’ve selected for protection!
The answer to this is to rename MacPassword™ file to a name that alphabetically comes after the name of the partitioning INIT or special INIT for your hard disk drive. MacPassword™ comes to you named “!MacPassword™”. As an experiment, rename the file to “zMacPassword™”. This should load it after all the other INITs in your System folder. Now restart your Macintosh and when you get to the Finder's Desktop immediately choose restart again. (The first time insures that the correct Shutdown code gets loaded, the second is that the proper protection is reinstated).
Note: If you rename MacPassword™, you will also need to rename the file “!MacPassword™ Sounds” to have MacPassword™ be able to find it upon Startup or Shutdown.
If everything works properly now, then leave MacPassword™ named as “zMacPassword™” and you should experience no more problems. If you still have problems, please see the above section about reporting problems to me.
