Blocking Google+ or personal Gmail accounts, but not Apps for Education accounts

[localzuk]

We use Google Apps for Education at our school, and it has started to trickle out that people can use their personal gmail accounts and use Google+, which is obviously not a favorable thing to be happening in school.

So, has anyone got any ideas how to prevent personal accounts from logging into gmail, or if not that, how to block google+ without disabling any other Google features?

[elsiegee40]

Google plus should be easily bockable as its URLs start with plus.google.com... you'll need to stop http and https.

I'm not sure you'd be able to block personal email accounts though

[OB1]

Hi.

Have a look at this post for how this currently works on smoothwall (we are working on a more streamlined solution).

What are you currently using for filtering?

[nephilim]

blocking *mail.google* and *plus.google* (Must have the * symbol so it blocks everything before, and everything after regardless) should do the trick for this. I found in my last place everyone was accessing it when they didn't need too, so blocking those 2 sorted that out.

[irsprint84]

I cheated and put plus.google.com in dns to point to 127.0.0.1

[FN-GM]

blocking *mail.google* and *plus.google* (Must have the * symbol so it blocks everything before, and everything after regardless) should do the trick for this. I found in my last place everyone was accessing it when they didn't need too, so blocking those 2 sorted that out.

Exactly we dont want to block everything, on the post is says he doesnt want google apps blocking.

@localzuk i think @tom_newton knows how to do it. I have tagged him so he should be along soon

[nephilim]

thats all well and good @irsprint84 but what about .de .ie .co.uk .fr. co.nz. au etc? doing the * method is far quicker

[nephilim]

Exactly we dont want to block everything, on the post is says he doesnt want google apps blocking.

@localzuk i think @tom_newton knows how to do it. I have tagged him so he should be along soon

It only blocks the portion of google that has mail.google or plus.google in the address bar...apps.google will work fine

[FN-GM]

It only blocks the portion of google that has mail.google or plus.google in the address bar...apps.google will work fine

But when you use the e-mail part in google apps it goes to mail.google.com. apps.google.com is only the site to promote the product.

[localzuk]

It only blocks the portion of google that has mail.google or plus.google in the address bar...apps.google will work fine

Google Mail is part of Apps, and we use it internally for all staff and students. So, blocking mail. would a big problem.

@tom_newton - we have a council provided netsweeper system doing our filtering at the moment.

[tom_newton]

You *may* be out of luck with netsweeper - afaik they support neither known method of limiting google accounts are you running your own proxy prior to netsweeper?

[localzuk]

You *may* be out of luck with netsweeper - afaik they support neither known method of limiting google accounts are you running your own proxy prior to netsweeper?

We have a proxy to plug in, but it is set up and managed by the council also.

[tom_newton]

Bad times. What is this local proxy?

[GrumbleDook]

You *may* be out of luck with netsweeper - afaik they support neither known method of limiting google accounts are you running your own proxy prior to netsweeper?

We asked the question recently and are going to sit down to work out some options of using NetSweeper and still allowing access to Google Apps for Edu whilst not opening up some of the other stuff. It truly is proving to be a minefield.

[localzuk]

Bad times. What is this local proxy?

Its a squid box, but we don't have any access to it.