H Tim Cunningham (heticu@pacifier.com) wrote: : I realize that a Novel/DOS network is a lower life form than Unix, but, : hey... someone has to do it. True, but that's the environment I started in, too. A couple of stories come to mind. When we brought our first Novell server up, the menu program we used to shield our public access machines from the DOS prompt was a little on the dodgy side. Every so often, it would dump the user back out to a DOS shell, where, owing to some serious design deficiencies in the menu program, they could do a lot of bad things, including deleting or modifying the menu itself. The obvious solution was to find a better menu program, which is what we did. In the interim, we came up with what I still think is one of my more creative pieces of system administration. We set the DOS prompt in the login script to read: Not ready error reading drive C: A)bort, R)etry, F)ail? We then created three batch files called a.bat, r.bat, and f.bat. The first and the last of these recalled the menu. The r.bat file echoed the prompt a second time. It'd be even more fun to talk about the problem user who got assigned a 360K disk quota on the file server (took him 2 years to notice) or the time we finally persuaded the same guy (who was located off site) to stop messing with his printer configuration by redirecting his lpt1 to com4 in his login script. The last one cut out a lot of remote site visits in a heartbeat. I don't miss those days one bit. --steve Steven Kirby University of Georgia kirby@rhett.libs.uga.edu "At Intel, we measure success one FDIV at a time"