Alright, so here's the situation from which my question stems:
I am building a website for a client, and they want to have a content type of "project", which is a piece of content relating to a project they are currently undertaking. The internals of that content are not important, however given the sensitive nature of their industry (prototyping), they want the pieces of content to have SOME variety of security, and not visible to anyone.
FIRST QUESTION: I need to be able to disable the overall node view. You know, the one in which all pieces of content are just haphazardly rendered for anyone to see. I never use that crapola anyways, so I'd love to learn how to disable it!
SECOND QUESTION: the client wants customers to be able to view their projects without having to have a login. He's of the strict belief that there are just too many god damn logins floating around out there, and I just can't blame him. So what he wants is something similar to a FED EX tracking #, in which when the project is created, a random id is generated which can be email to the client. The client then enters that ID, and it will allow them to view the project status.
The best i can figure to do this is create a randomly generated string of text such as "A7723232PR99", and then bounce that against all the other node's in this content type to ensure it hasn't occurred before (rare, but a possibility). This would in no way distinguish who the client is, and given it's truly random nature wouldn't be easily guessed. Combine Re-captcha with the submission form to look up your ID, and going in through the front door isn't such a viable option anymore.
...so oh great drupalists, how the heck would I go about doing this? Am I looking at something complex and quite custom, or has some one done something even remotely similar to this in the past?