Flash Games - Temp remove students access

[burgemaster]

For repeat offenders constanlty playing games, when they log in we have been manually browsing into:

 

\\COMPUTER NAME\c$\WINDOWS\system32\Macromed\Flash

 

And tempararly renaming the FlDbg9c.ocx file to FlDbg9c.ocxorig...

 

This stops them being able to us any flash sites etc...

 

I was wondering is someone had any idea or a vbs that would rename this file and then rename back on logout? or even to do it on the fly?

we could then apply this to them or to a group?

 

I know they will struggle when tyring to legitimatly use swf files, but 95% of the time they are not..

 

My plan is if they are banned from the net and cannot play there swf games they might do some work!

[ricki]

Hi

 

You might be better putting the students into a group and then denying this group permission to read the file.

 

Have a look at Cacls - Modify Access Control List

 

This could be applied to or machines.

 

Or you could add it the logon script for the student to deny them access and a different script at log off to change the permissons.

 

Just an ideas .

 

Richard

[ricki]

Sorry I forgot.

 

Be careful doing this as it will break the students ability to use that program for everything including educational games and teachers might not be very pleased with that.

 

Richard

[srochford]

a problem with the group idea is that you can't do it on the fly - group changes only take effect at logon.

 

a normal user wouldn't have rights to rename that file so you can't really do it in a logon script. You could have the logon script call (eg) a web service which then connected back to the workstation and made the change.

 

Is the problem with this that students are playing games during lesson time and you could actually turn off flash on all the machines at that time? If so, it would be easy to script something using cacls that the teacher could use to reset the perms on that file at the start of the lesson.

[StewartBondi]

We use Impero to manage all sorts of access limitations, one of which relates to controlling access to Flash Games. The Policy detects instances of captions for "about Flash Professional", "Macromedia Flash Player" and also URL and filenames that includes .SWF.