Moving, Removing, Disabling Administration on live server
The best approach would be to deny access to the administration pages for certain roles on your live site using standard Drupal permissions ( http://example.com/admin/people/permissions ).

The permission you're looking for is called "Use the administration pages and help".

Returning a 404 for all admin pages doesn't seem like the correct thing to do here, as the page has been found. A 403 is the correct semantic response for this.

If you're desperate, having the following code in a module on your live site only would do the trick:

function MYMODULE_init() {
  if (arg(0) == 'admin' &amp;&amp; $GLOBALS['user']-&gt;uid != 1) {
    drupal_not_found();
  }
}


But I can't say I'd recommend it :)