How to force Google Safe Search with RM SmartCache 2

[gl3nnym]

Hi All

As the title says really.
We have an issue with our RM SmartCache 2 server whereby a pupil can go on to Google Images but if they search for something it gets blocked by "Content Filtering". There are no policies blocking it and rules have been setup to allow access.

We have found though that if a pupil manually sets the search preferences to Strict then they can browse images just fine.

RM have told me that there is nothing they can do to help and that I will have to manually set it on about 700 computers which tbh I am not keen to do! Is there a way I can automate this at all?

Any help appreciated :-)
Cheers

[le4ne]

Hi gl3nnym,

Although we don't use RM SmartCache2 now (changed to smoothwall), we used to get around this problem by blocking the google search settings URL for the main google sites Preferences etc

We did try other ways of stopping students from changing the safe search settings but it never really worked very well. Essentially if students can't change the safe search settings, then they can't turn safe searching off?

The only way we easily managed to enforce safe searching was switching web filtering as smoothwall and others tend to have this built in. We changed to smoothwall for many reasons but had been unhappy wirh SmartCache2 for quite a while.

Hope this helps!

[gl3nnym]

Hi le4ne

Thanks for the reply. We are not in a position to change filters at the moment so have to stick with SmartCache2.
I need to find a way to force safe search somehow otherwise I will be have a long weekend manually changing every computer (according to RM). This seems to be the only way they can access Google Images.

[gl3nnym]

Does anybody have any other ideas? Is there another way I can force this through some kind of script?

[MYK-IT]

Just like le4ne, we are in the process of swapping out our RM SmartCache 2 box with 2 new shiney SmoothWall UTM-1000 appliances

I've just had a quick look through the Deny Filters on our old RM SmartCache 2 box as I was sure we (attempted) something similar:

You could try adding the following block rules:

*.google.*/advanced_image_search*
*.google.*/advanced_search*

*.google.*/preferences*
*.google.*/*safe=off*