[RESOLVED] Inexpensive Website blocker software???

[blakemckenna]

I have a friend that manages a dentist office. This office has 4 separate PC's, all of which can access the internet using IE. She has had problems with several employees who abuse the web by browsing websites they shouldn't be on.

Is there any software out there that is relatively inexpensive (under $100) that can be used for each machine without purchasing multiple licenses?

Or is there a better way of handling this situation?

Thanks,

[abhijit]

I have a friend that manages a dentist office. This office has 4 separate PC's, all of which can access the internet using IE. She has had problems with several employees who abuse the web by browsing websites they shouldn't be on.

Is there any software out there that is relatively inexpensive (under $100) that can be used for each machine without purchasing multiple licenses?

Or is there a better way of handling this situation?

Thanks,

She can configure the router to allow specific websites.

That's one way of doing it.

[blakemckenna]

She nor I have no clue how to do that...

[chris128]

Yeah thats the best way of doing it. Basically if you are providing internet access to more than one PC using the same internet line then you have to have a Router. The router has an IP address (which is unique on your network) and so do all of your PCs. They use these IP addresses to communicate to each other. In fact, when you type a web site address into your browser it actually just gets resolved to an IP address and that is how your computer talks to the web site servers... but anyway, thats irrelevant isnt it!
Most modern routers have a web interface that you can access to configure them and the standard way to access this is to open up internet explorer on one of the PCs that is on the same network as the router and go to http://RouterIPHere - so for example if your router's IP was 192.168.0.1 (which is fairly common) you would go to http://192.168.0.1 and you would probably be asked for a password. Depending on the make of router and assuming that you have never specified your own password for it then this password will either be blank or will be a default password such as "admin" or "password". You can usually find out the default password from the manuals that come with it. The default IP address should also be in there but if you cannot find it then you will probably be able to find it out by just checking the default gateway on one of the PCs. To do this, go to Start -> Run -> type cmd -> OK -> in the command prompt window type ipconfig and press enter. You should now see a few things but one should be labelled Default Gateway. This is likely to be your router's IP address.
Note that I am assuming it is a pretty simple network setup at this office.

Anyway, once you are logged in to there you should see a range of menus/options. It varies a lot from router to router but you should have the option somewhere to restrict access to specific web sites. Note that this usually affects all users though unless it is quite an advanced router, so if you blocked www.google.com on the router then no one would be able to access it from any PC.


The alternative 'solutions' vary depending on what level of access each of these users has to their PC - I mean if their accounts on these PCs have local administrator rights then they would potentially be able to reverse whatever changes you make to their PCs if they know how.

Hope that helps but if you want any more info or other methods then let me know if you are trying to block access just for specific websites or if you want to stop them using IE altogether.

Cheers
Chris

[blakemckenna]

Chris,

What I did, and make no mistake, I am not a network guru, was added sites that these employees used in their jobs to the IE Content Manager and password protected this functionality. When they initially get into the website, they are prompted to enter a password. A manager would then enter the password and click on the option button that says "Always allow this site to be viewed" or something like that and then that would prevent them from having to enter a password.

Anyway, I need to talk with the owner of this office and see how he wishes to proceed. As far as available inexpensive software...do you know of any?

Thanks,

[chris128]

Why buy any software when you can probably just do it on the router like I described?

[abhijit]

the other alternative is to enable content advisor on IE.

Here's an article describing that.

[chris128]

the other alternative is to unable content advisor on IE.

Here's an article describing that.

isnt that exactly what he said he had already done?
That article also mentions what I was about to suggest, editing the hosts file on each PC to add websites that you want blocking. However, it would be much more reliable to block the web sites on the router as described in my previous post.

[blakemckenna]

Chris,

Are you saying that everytime the manager wanted to block a website...they would have to enter on the router? If so, I don't believe they would be willing to do that. They need to have an automated function that will just allow them to access authorized sites.

[abhijit]

Chris,

Are you saying that everytime the manager wanted to block a website...they would have to enter on the router? If so, I don't believe they would be willing to do that. They need to have an automated function that will just allow them to access authorized sites.

Blake,
Are all the browsers in that office accessing the internet through a proxy server?

[blakemckenna]

No...

[abhijit]

No...

Are the computers logging on a domain?

[chris128]

Chris,

Are you saying that everytime the manager wanted to block a website...they would have to enter on the router? If so, I don't believe they would be willing to do that. They need to have an automated function that will just allow them to access authorized sites.

What so the network is supposed to read their mind and realise that they want to block a website and do it for them

Do you want to allow all websites except some blocked ones or do you want to block all websites except some allowed ones?

[blakemckenna]

I want to block ALL websites and allow only those that they need for work purposes, i.e. insurance claim sites. There are about 11 websites that the employees need to access for work purposes.

[chris128]

Ahhhh I see, well you should of explained that a littler better in the original post
In that case though, I'm afraid I dont really have any suggestions. Sorry

[abhijit]

I want to block ALL websites and allow only those that they need for work purposes, i.e. insurance claim sites. There are about 11 websites that the employees need to access for work purposes.

You could configure the router to allow the permitted websites and block the rest.

[chris128]

My router at home only allows me to block specific websites, not allow specific websites, so I guess it depends if your router supports that functionality or not

[abhijit]

My router at home only allows me to block specific websites, not allow specific websites, so I guess it depends if your router supports that functionality or not

Which router have you got?

[Kasracer]

You could update the hosts file on the machine and copy it to all other machines. I think you can create rules to block all sites in the hosts file then allow only certain ones.

[blakemckenna]

Kasracer,

What is the hosts file and how would I go about doing this?

Thanks,

[Kasracer]

Kasracer,

What is the hosts file and how would I go about doing this?

Thanks,

There is a file called "hosts" (it has no extension) and it determines what the computer tries to connect to when reaching out over the network.

It is typically stored at the following path: C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

So, for example, if I wanted to block access to myspace I could do:

127.0.0.1       myspace.com

Then, no matter what browser you're using, myspace.com will automatically forward to your computer's localhost (172.0.0.1) which is most likely nothing. The beauty of this is that it requires an admin to update it so if your users are not admins... they can't get around it .

You can Google for more information on updating your Hosts file as there may be some creative things you can do (i.e. I think you can use * to indicate a wildcard but I'm not 100% sure).

So the format basically goes

[Address To Go To]            [Address That Forwards To The "Address To Go To"]

So if you wanted to mess with someone, you could do

Microsoft.com      Apple.com

[chris128]

The whole hosts file thing was already suggested by abhijit and also by me so I dont know why you ignored it the first two times lol

Oh and Kasracer I'm pretty sure you cant use wildcards (*) in the host file because there would be no valid reason to do this. The hosts file isnt meant to be used for this kind of thing, its purpose is to aid name resolution when DNS cannot resolve a name to an IP address.
So basically all it is for is to map names to IP addresses, and you wouldnt ever want to map every host within a domain to the same IP so thats why I doubt you can use wildcards.
I also dont think mapping apple.com to microsoft.com would work because like I said its designed to map names to IP addresses, not names to names.

[Kasracer]

The whole hosts file thing was already suggested by abhijit and also by me so I dont know why you ignored it the first two times lol

I didn't read the thread

Oh and Kasracer I'm pretty sure you cant use wildcards (*) in the host file because there would be no valid reason to do this.

Yup, you're right. I could have sworn I've seen them in hosts files before but I looked it up after my posting.

T
I also dont think mapping apple.com to microsoft.com would work because like I said its designed to map names to IP addresses, not names to names.

Yeah I tried that a couple of minutes ago; didn't work but I don't see why it wouldn't; an IP is just as good as a domain I had thought... either way you could replace microsoft.com with its IP address.

[chris128]

Well no an IP is not just as good as a domain name / host name / whatever you want to call it.
A domain name is purely there because as human beings we find it easier to remember and refer to words instead of numbers, however for computers it is the other way around so we need some kind of system to translate the names to the IP addresses (this is called resolving). So when you type a web site address into your web browser it just gets 'resolved' to the correct IP address for that host and then your computer sends/receives data to and from that IP address.
When your computer tries to resolve a domain name or host name, it tries a few different things and one of the first things is to check the hosts file to see if there is an entry in there for the domain/server name you are trying to reach. If there isnt then it tries other things, such as sending a request out to a DNS server (which is a server that is responsible for resolving names to IP addresses either in your own network or on the internet).
But I wont go any further into that, all I'm getting at is that the whole point of the hosts file is to aid name resolution so there is no valid reason to ever enter two domain names in there to try and make them forward on to each other.

[blakemckenna]

Ok,

Let me reverse all this. Is there anyway I can enter into SOMETHING all the valid websites they are allowed/need to access and have everything else be blocked? That's pretty much what I need to do in a nutshell.

[abhijit]

Ok,

Let me reverse all this. Is there anyway I can enter into SOMETHING all the valid websites they are allowed/need to access and have everything else be blocked? That's pretty much what I need to do in a nutshell.

There are some software's listed on cnet.

Click this link to get the list.

[blakemckenna]

thanks ab....I think I found what I was looking for!!!