Surf control web filter

:(

The work at which i work at have signed up for one of the fantasy permier league football sites for schools. All well and good but we are having none stop complaints that students are accessing it in lessons. My aim is to allow the site at break and dinner time and deny at any other time. In surfcontrol there is a rule system that i thought would be the way in which to do it. I thought that if you filter the destination as a category and then overide this with the overrise featur that it would work. I set my own deny page so that they would understand that the site will only work during break and lunch. This does not display. I just cannot get it to work. Is there an order of which i need to place my rule. i.e above or below teh category i am disallowing and that it falls into.

Please Help

I would be much appreciated.

:lol:

You can specify just the site that you want by adding it as a User Defined Where Object.

Do this by opening up the Rules Administrator program, clicking on the Where(1) tab at the top of the second half of the screen. Then expand the Hosts and Domains(2) item with the + and then right click in the Object(3) list and click New. Select the type as "Domain" and add the main bit of the sites domain ie leave out www. just add livesports.com or whatever.

You can now use this in an allow object at the top of your rules list. Just set the allow rule to use that specific Host/Domain as the Where object. To enable the time restriction you can change the When tab in the properties of the rule to allow it at only specific times. So long as your Enterprise User Monitoring is working properly you can restrict the rule to only certain users or groups as well.

Right Im one step closer i have done that and its working. I wanted to create a http deny page for the times that it is not allowed stating that it is only permitted at certain times. do i have to create a disallow rule that would simply state this or can you do this another way?

Thanks for your help before that was very helpful.

Surfcontrol runs the rules list from the top down so as soon as it finds a rule that applies to the traffic it uses that and stops checking the rest of the list.

You could add a custom deny page by adding a DISALLOW rule just before the ALLOW rule that you created. Just set the Where to your user specified domain name and set the When times to when it is not allowed. To prevent duplication you could also remove the time restrictions on the allow rule as if it is outside the allowed times the DISALLOW rule will stop it. You can then add a custom deny page to this rule which will come up when it is being blocked.

You can add the custom deny page by clicking the Http Deny Page tab at the top of the second half of the screen. Then right click in the list area(3) and select new. You will need to know a bit of HTML to pull it off or you could make the page in your favorite editor and copy the source into the window that it provides.

Thank you very much. Done that and it is working like a charm. My network manager said that he would just have blocked it..... i want to stay on the good side of the students.llol. I will add this to our knowledgebase for the future.

Thanks for all your help


Liam