Blocking iGoogle but not google?

[mrforgetful]

Are you using anything? I imagine it's a pretty basic function of any firewall.

[kennysarmy]

Proxy on site is ....Wingate.

[mrforgetful]

There's a pretty extensive Forum on the Wingate website here which may help. Frequented by support personnel apparantly

[mrforgetful]

Found some info,

Apparantly http redirects are not supported in 6.x but there is a work around mentioned in this thread that goes like this:

There is a `roundabout` way that you can redirect HTTP requests in version 6.x, but it can get a bit involved if you plan to do alot of redirecting. I have included a guide on how we managed to do this below for you. Maybe this will be a suitable solution until the next version of WinGate is released.


The main function of the WWW Proxy Server in WinGate is to receive "proxy" requests from your client computers and then act on these requests on behalf of the client computer, however there is another function of the WWW Proxy Server that allows you to specify how the Proxy reacts to Server requests aswell. One of the actions that you can specify for a server request is to "redirect" the request to another URL.

Knowing this, all you need to do is fool your client computers into thinking that the Wingate computer is the host for google.com so that the WWW Proxy can pick up the request and redirect it. As long as your client computer has the WinGate computers IP set as it's DNS server, you can do this using the "Hosts" file on your WinGate server.

- Gatekeeper -> System tab -> DNS/WINS Resolver -> DNS
- Click on the Edit button on the lower right hand side of the window
- Add new entries to the hosts file for any URL's that you want to redirect and set the IP address to the WinGate computers internal IP address. e.g.
Code:
www.google.com 192.168.1.1
google.com 192.168.1.1
- Save and close the hosts file

Wingate will start resolving DNS requests for google.com and www.google.com as 192.168.1.1, rather than the actual public IP address of google.com. Now you just need to configure the WWW Proxy Server to rredirect these domains to yahoo.com.

- Gatekeeper -> Services tab -> WWW Proxy Server -> Web Server
- Click Add
- Change the action to redirect
- Enter the URL as "www.yahoo.com"
- Goto the hosts tab
- Click Add
- enter "www.google.com"
- Click Add again
- enter "google.com"
- Click OK, then OK.


That should be it. You're client computers will now think that the WinGate computer is hosting google.com and will ask WinGate for the site. WinGate will then receive these requests for google and redirect them to Yahoo.

Note: This may take a while to start working properly because of DNS caching. You can do use the following command in the command prompt to reset the DNS cache of your client computers.

[rpycroft]

Hi, I've just added:

www.google.com/ig
www.google.co.uk/ig
www.google.ie/ig (just in case)

to our block list in ISA - using the forwarding trick cleverly devised by mrforgetful but I was thinking the kids could probably go to, say, google china or whatever other countries use google, right? Anyone got a list of all the google domains around the world that may use igoogle? Im quite sure none of the little darlings are bright enough to get around this but thought I'd make sure...

Cheers.
Richard.

[mrforgetful]

Have you tried just doing www.google* and http://google* ?

I'm not sure if it will work or not but worth a try.

As for them using Google China, as long as they don't go searching for topics on democracy....

[rpycroft]

Have you tried just doing www.google* and http://google* ?

I'm not sure if it will work or not but worth a try.

As for them using Google China, as long as they don't go searching for topics on democracy....

I think this would block google.com instead of google.com/ig aswell though.

Just need to find a list of google's domain names for their worldwide sites... I'll have a quick search now.

[mark]

We blocked it successfully with DansGuarian (don't ask me how - it was a long time ago!! )

Our kids were playing the games, and our local filter was ineffective. There are some quite nasty widgets IIRC

[jggonz]

I successfully blocked igoogle chat by blocking the chat gadget directly.

I used a firewall block to the googletalk gadget IP address. You can also use URL filtering or host redirects.

Take a look at the full description and options at my blog.

George, The IT Guy: How to block google chat in igoogle.com

[elloyd69]

I blocked it in Policy Central, seems to be working ok.

[elsiegee40]

On a related topic, is it possible to force a browser to access original google? Some teachers/pupils have tried to use iGoogle (which is blocked at LEA level), the problem is that somthing makes IE automatically go to ig each time.

Mandatory profiles...

Access to iGoogle conveniently forgotten each time

[NeoPlosive]

I originally blocked iGoogle but due to cookies being present on some profiles that had used iGoogle it soon became a bit of a pain in the neck to constantly be dealing with people who had Google blocked.

After looking through the logs I realised that the iGoogle modules had a base url of gmodules.com so I blocked *.gmodules.com which pretty much renders iGoogle pages useless.

I will look at the redirect url above as a method to finally get rid of iGoogle properly but in the meantime blocking *.gmodules.com has helped a lot.

[Cowardlyduck]

Hi,

We have found students are installing Igoogle addons in order to access things like facebook, myspace, etc.

We have some people in the school that have legitimate use for Igoogle however.

Is there an easy way to block specific IGoogle addons?

We use TTC for trafic control.

Thanks,

Blake

[NeoPlosive]

If the modules use the gmodules.com address then you could block the specific addresses, otherwise if they use the standard domains your blocks should be working.

[AlexB]

We block:-
.igoogle.com
.gmodules.com
.googlecode.com

This still allows igoogle to function (so you don't get stuck at a block page forever!) but prevents the bulk of the widgets working.