Teststand Password

[sagar7077bishwas]

Hi Team,

To protect my sequence files on teststand by password,to do so i found the below option on teststand from sequence file properties on edit drop down option. i would like to know is there any other better way to protect sequence file from editing that NI teststand suggesting.

Regards,

Sagar

[santo_13]

Your related post for LV side - VI password protection - NI Community

What is your intention to implement this protection?

[Scott_Richardson]

Quick thoughts:

• The answer to the question above asking what you are trying to achieve is important to discuss further.
• When I was at NI, we designed TestStand's password protection to prevent users from (1) easily discovering the structure and content of the file, (2) to prevent copying its content in the editor, and (3) prevent changing behavior, such as on a deployed system. The TestStand API was and is quite open so preventing editing was fairly straight forward in the editor and saving the file to be non readable was already there, but preventing discovery during execution was the biggest challenge, and for the most part that was successful.
• What I have seen customers need and implement are processes/components to validate that a deployed system has not changed, specifically that the sequence files and module calls were not modified, i.e. tooling to track and validate that file checksums are in tact.

[Oli_Wachno]

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@Scott_Richardson wrote:

[...]

• What I have seen customers need and implement are processes/components to validate that a deployed system has not changed, specifically that the sequence files and module calls were not modified, i.e. tooling to track and validate that file checksums are in tact.

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given that a deplyoment consist not of a single file but gazillions, especially when you are also taking into account the framework... this is a real challenge

[Scott_Richardson]

Oli -

I agree, all depends on how controlled/locked-down you need the deployed system to be.

If developers can relegate files to a set of directories that need to be controlled, I could see deploying the controlled folders using WIM (Windows Imaging Format):

• Single file - contains an entire directory tree.
• Mountable - DISM command lets you mount it as a folder.
• Update modes - you can mount read-only, read/write with changes saved back into the WIM, or mount with changes discarded at unmount.

Not saying that it is easy, but it is something that most do not know about as a base OS technology. The base OS still has to have the software properly installed first. NI was using this for its semiconductor related deployments to quickly swap full test configurations under 10 minutes.