Password Protect Folders

I know this is probably gonna sound like a daft question, but here goes ....

I want to password protect a network folder - not to control security of that folder as that will obviously be by using NTFS permissions. Here's the scenario:

• Classroom of students all have access to folder called "Fred" on drive "G" via NTFS permissions
• Students can not open "Fred" as they dont know folder password
• Teacher tells class the password, students enter this and then have access to data in "Fred"
• End of lesson, Teacher sets the folder password to somthing different

Basically, I want them to have NTFS permissions sorted, but give the teacher an additional control so that students can only access something when she tells them to start by way of giving them an access password.

Cheers

I would say this is potentially possible, but you'll need something third party to be able to do it. It would have to be something that works with NTFS.

Not sure that this is possible directly with NTFS unless your system is set to prompt for an alternate account on authentication failure. It would probably be better to have the teacher alter the NTFS permissions on the folder to allow them and then there is no overhead of a classfull of students entering in a correct password.

Perhapse even a script with SetACL that the teacher could click to enable/disable the students to access it to remove any teacher learning related issues from the process.

Can you put the students into groups before the lesson? If so, you could have something which the teacher could run which says "which group needs access now". The app then just adds the appropriate group to the folder permissions.

You could even do it with scheduled tasks if appropriate - eg at 0900 group 9A1 gets access which is removed at 1000; group 9B2 gets access at 1000 and removed at 1100 etc

What you can't easily do is set the folder to be accessible to "Folder_Fred_users" and add the users to that group during the lesson because the access rights won't be picked up until their next logon.

Thanks for the ideas guys. I hadn't thought about setting rights using a script - that sounds like the best bet - the teacher can run the script file just before the students logon. I'll have a look into that route as a solution.

Cheers

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Originally Posted by brahma

Thanks for the ideas guys. I hadn't thought about setting rights using a script - that sounds like the best bet - the teacher can run the script file just before the students logon. I'll have a look into that route as a solution.

Cheers

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Definitely the easiest route - just to add though, the teacher shouldn't have to do it before the kids log on unless they haven't got access to a machine during the lesson. As long as it's a network folder the kids are accessing, as soon as the teacher runs available.bat or whatever the kids will immediately be able to access it.