Disabling internet in one room.

[TheLibrarian]

We have LANSchool which allows the Internet to be disabled, we also disable the Internet by default and have an in house utility to allow the teachers to enable it as and when.
Our method does rely somewhat on DeepFreeze, but I'm sure someone could work around it.

GPO that gives the proxy details to students gives a name not an IP address.

On each PC the hosts file is set so that the proxy name resolves to 127.0.0.1.

Teachers utility copies a hosts file to the student PC's that does not have the entry for the proxy name.

Here's where DeepFreeze comes in:
DeepFreeze is running so when the PC is rebooted the blocked hosts file is "replaced".
DeepFreeze also reboots the PC's at log off effectively resetting the Internet block for the next user.


I did toy with the idea of setting an invalid ARP address for the proxy server on the client PC's and the teacher utility would remove the invalid entry.


I haven't given any thought to getting round the DeepFreeze requirement because I don't need to.

[liteboy]

Impero mate - dead simple

[amvc]

We have just implemented this using smoothwall and its 'per location settings' very nice solution!

We have created a user account that only has access to enable and disable each room in per location settings, what i am interested in is, can i pass the username and password to this from a link on our staff intranet? I want to make it as easy as possible for the users.

Thanks

Jon

[mac_shinobi]

Impero mate - dead simple

Another + 1 for impero

[tom_newton]

Jon,

Use the force... er I mean the portal. The portal allows users access to a very limited subset of controls, but luckily room blocking is one of them. The portal is accessed by your AD username - so you will not need to create extra accounts. It is a bit of a **** to work out at first, and is well hidden under the "services" menu. If you need a hand, give us a bell!

[amvc]

Jon,

Use the force... er I mean the portal. The portal allows users access to a very limited subset of controls, but luckily room blocking is one of them. The portal is accessed by your AD username - so you will not need to create extra accounts. It is a bit of a **** to work out at first, and is well hidden under the "services" menu. If you need a hand, give us a bell!

Will have a crack at that, may be on the phone later

Jon

[gizmo2005]

The only other thing we have is an ISA2004 server which we've just set up, so we're not too clued up on all it's bells and whistles yet.

We have had a trial of Netsupport before, but kids would just hit the reset button on their PCs to disconnect from the session, thereby removing restrictions from themselves. We contacted them about that problem, but there was no solution for it at the time. (It was about a year ago)

Cheers for the reply though.

not sure if you have heard of this one or if it has been mentioned in the thread if it has then sorry, have you looked at getting a trial of Impero, this is a classroom management software and it manages your network, Kids hate this and networkmanagers get to play God , i used to sell impero for another company and would alway recommend this try this number and ask for a Mr Mark Vesty 01509 633 550 he will get you a trial

[amvc]

Thats great Tom, not hard to setup at all, thanks.

Only problem now is a certificate error...

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Thanks

Jon

[tom_newton]

You may need to poke the Smoothie's cert out as trusted in group pol - that'll sack that off ok i'd have thought!

(OK, maybe the portals only hard for me to set up because i'm a bit tic)

[Dos_Box]

Wow. This was our first technical question on EduGeek after we went live 5 years ago, and it's still running. Nice

[tom_newton]

Also proves I'm not a complete **** for asking the devs to put location based blocking and a portal in Smoothie. Which is nice.

[amvc]

You may need to poke the Smoothie's cert out as trusted in group pol - that'll sack that off ok i'd have thought!

(OK, maybe the portals only hard for me to set up because i'm a bit tic)

Thats sorted it thanks. All up and running as we wanted. To think i read through all 11 pages of this before i noticed your suggestion of using smoothwall, didnt even know it had the capability. The portals a new one on me too. Gonna make some teachers very happy in the new term

Jon