Blocking iGoogle but not google?

[techyphil]

Does you block iGoogle?

 

I want to block iGoogle here because all the kids use game and chat addon's whilst working and switch to and from it during pretty much all their lessons.

 

I thought about blocking just the ip address as its different to google but users can still click the iGoogle link from google.

 

I think I might just go down the route of making the window title illegal in Ranger if theres no definite way via the ISA.

 

Cheers

[clareq]

I block google.co.uk/ig and google.com/ig

[techyphil]

OK, slight problems with blocking website via Microsoft's ISA Management Server.

 

The majority of the blocked websites in my list are blocked and redirect the user as it should do. Although some do not. I have added *.google.co.uk/ig http://www.google.co.uk/ig http://www.google.com/ig etc etc.

 

None of which actually get blocked.

 

Im not very clued up with ISA management but get the jist of it. Is there anything obvious that needs to be checked?

[rhyds]

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.

[mrforgetful]

You could try redirecting http://www.google.co.uk/ig to http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=p&pref=ig&pval=1&q=/webhp

[enjay]

Maybe I'm missing something, but where is the harm in iGoogle?

[Geoff]

I think it's the games and chat that are the main concerns.

[kennysarmy]

I blocked it on advice of OP however now getting kids complaining that if they've used igoogle in the past it tries to auto-redirect them to igoogle when they go to http://www.google.co.uk, but it's redirecting them to a blocked page.

 

hmmmmm

[Geoff]

That's just cookies.

[mrforgetful]

Use my method further up.

 

That redirects them to the link in the top right of iGoogle which sets you back to normal Google.

[enjay]

I think it's the games and chat that are the main concerns.

Ah, our girls use their email for chat :-)

Could you not just block the games bits of it, or does it not work like that?

[Geoff]

It depends how flexible your filter is. I could do that here with dansguardian, but anything that can't pattern match url substrings is in for a hard time.

[kennysarmy]

You could try redirecting http://www.google.co.uk/ig to http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=p&pref=ig&pval=1&q=/webhp

 

maybe I am being thick - but where do I do this?

[DSapseid]

Assuming you are on ISA. You need to create a new firewall and URL set containg the igoogle urls and on the action tab of the firewall rule properties there is a redirect to box and just put the address in there.

 

I have forwarded my blocks to the county filter so the kids think its county not me:p

[kennysarmy]

ah

 

thats why it meant nothing to me.

not on ISA

[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:

http://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 http://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:

 

http://www.google.com/ig

http://www.google.co.uk/ig

http://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 http://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 http://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.

[MkII]

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.