Menu: password on an item

[blanalex]

Is there a way to put a password on an item in the menu?

If not, it would be a great feature to add!

[robinsmidsrod]

Not directly, but you can sort of work around it with some fancy scripting. You can make the menu item go to a label that asks for a username/password, then you can chain off to a server-side script that will validate the credentials, and depending on what it says it'll either return an empty or a full menu or do whatever it is supposed to do.

[blanalex]

I'm looking for a way to lock a sub menu on the client side.

Something like this:
1 - Boot from hard disk
2 - Network utilities (administrators only)

With option 1 obviously being the default with a timeout value, and option 2 protected with a password.

[robinsmidsrod]

You can't do that in a secure way, but if you only want to make it a bit harder for normal users to reach the admin utils you can make the admin menu go to a script section that asks for username/password and then just check that the password matches a predefined password (which would be listed in the script file in cleartext). Obviously a smart user will be able to find the password by fetching the script using a browser, tftp client or something else. Normal, dumb, users won't be able to figure it out, though.