ok, here's the rundown.
I need to password protect my computer, but If I use filevault, I can't access my system from the network. which is something I need to do. Is there a way I can password protect my disc (so it can't be mounted from another disc without a password) and still be able to use the file and printer sharing over the network? I am using tiger, and with the rash of burglaries around here, I would be more at ease if I could keep my client's data out of "evil" hands. Got any suggestions?
Setup a disk image through Disk Utility with encryption. Then you can mount the image and share it over the network. You'll need the password everytime it mounts, so if the machine is stolen, it'll probably get powered off, and thus your clients data is safe and encryped.
never thought of that. That's a good idea. Thanks! However, what happens if the disk image gets full? do I just transfer it to another one? or can I create a dynamic image that will expand as it gets more added to, much like VPC?
You could always create another image and copy the contents over. You could even create a seperate partition and create a single image that fills much of it. There are ways to make encrypted partitions, but I don't know if they would be as easy to dela with. With the encrypted image, you can just copy the raw image over your network at will and open it on a different machine locally if you wanted to. If it's only going to be read only data, and it will fit ohn a CD/DVD, then make an encrypted image to fit, fill it up and then burn the image to a disc as a file, not an actual CD. that way you can do the same ecrypted mouting setup. I don't know if this would be better than an whole encrypted CD, but at least if a machine couldn't mount an encrypted CD, it certainly could copy the encrypted image around as raw data.
Make a sparseimage set to nearly the size of the drive that it's stored on. That size will be the capacity of the image and you can keep adding data until you either reach that limit or fill the hard drive that it's stored on, but the image won't take more space than it needs for the data it contains.
Side note: this is also a good way to store files that may have resource forks that need to be retained on a non-hfs disk.