2xExplorer Hiding Drives and Disabling features in the menu

boein · Post by **boein** » 2003 Oct 09, 06:21

Hello,

does anybody know if 2xExplorer can hide drives. My problem is that when using policies in windows hiding certain drive letters (a: c: d:) users can still see these drives in 2xExplorer while they can not see them in the windows explorer. Is there a registry setting so you can force 2xExplorer not to show them.
Second question: Is it also possible to force some settings so users can not add for example the "drive letter bar". Problem is that users can easily re-add this feature through the menu afterwards, so it must be possible to disable some functions in the menu to avoid users re-enabling things. Anybody knows how.

Thanks.

Kind Regards

Wim

Post by **nikos** » 2003 Oct 09, 07:17

these windows policies are half-measures since they don't block dos devices. So even if you could block users somehow from accessing drives from 2x (which you can't), smart ones could just open a dos box or type in a drive letter name in the addressbar

so your only solution would be some windows setting that hides dos partitions or perhaps applies security settings to make them inaccessible to common users. I wouldn't know how to do this other than saying that probably it is one of those items in the Administrative Tools in control panel

boein · Post by **boein** » 2003 Oct 09, 07:41

Thanks for you quick reply Nikos,

If you cannot hide these drives is it possible to disable windows in 2xexplorer? Strange enough the left pane in 2xexplorer doesn't show the drives, but when you enable the "drive bar" (the small bar next to the left pane) you can see all the other drives in this drive-bar (even the ones you cannot see in the left pane), the left pane only shows the drives not hidden by policies. Very strange! Maybe if you can disable this so users cannot enable these bars via the menu (like "adress bar" and "drive bar") I think our problem is solved. But I don't know if this is possible, if there is a way to do this, please let me know.
As for the CMD-problem, we use an extra software layer upon our citrix-servers called powerfuse, this software prohibits execution of certain programs like CMD.

Regards
Wim

Post by **nikos** » 2003 Oct 09, 11:25

still, if a user typed "f:\" in the addressbar, and this was a "hidden" drive, it would still be found, whether the drivebar was visible or not. So in that sense your security would have a hole -- big one!

although you can't disable the drivebar you could hack the registry so that it opens floating out of the screen so that users cannot see it. But smart users could edit the registry for cancelling that too!

that's why i said that security descriptors should be your #1 option

boein · Post by **boein** » 2003 Oct 09, 11:39

Yes I know that I have to make the adress-bar inaccessible too. That's why I mentioned those two examples (address bar and drive bar) in my previous post. Maybe it's not a bad idea to let the bars float out of the window. Have you tried this yet, which coordinates should I use and which keys do I have to modify. On our system the users cannot change the registry, because powerfuse let them only execute programs like word, excel notes etc. Only problem is explorer, and we do need another explorer because the one of M$ is crap. Maybe you've heard about the explorer flicker issue in windows xp and windows 2003. For Terminal servers it's a serious performace killer, that's why we are looking for another explorer. So if you can help me out with 2xexplorer that would be great, maybe afterwards you can sell the explorer to M$, they can definitely learn from it

Regards

Wim

Post by **nikos** » 2003 Oct 09, 12:55

if the users cannot edit the registry here's a workaround:
run 2x and manually hide the bars you want using the menus
quit the program and copy the registry key (all data)
Then use these values as defaults for all new users

then create a special version of 2xExplorer.exe, using resource hacker, to remove the menu items that control these toolbars

while you are at it you may want to disable the menu items (and their accelerator keys) that allow command execution too, since these will reactivate the addressbar

but after all that there's the keyboard shortcut problem: [Ctrl+Shift+drive letter] can also be used to switch to drives. I can't see an easy workaround for this one...

boein · Post by **boein** » 2003 Oct 10, 11:08

I modified 2xExplorer with reshack, and now the items are gone in the menu. Thanks for the tip Nikos, now we have a good alternative for our windows 2003 explorer.

Regards

Wim