Censornet Groups

[leon]

Morning all,

 

Our school has been using a Netpilot box, which is totally ineffectual as it only supports URL filtering, so I've been playing around with Censornet...

 

The user guide would have you believe it's possible to import users from AD by group, and have Censornet assign those users to a group of the same name.

 

I'm running the most up to date version but I can't see this feature. I can import from AD but only by username. Am I forced to import an OU at a time and assign groups myself within Censornet?

 

For authentication to work with our Netpilot, the groups had to live in the same container as the admin account used to authenticate. I would try this but when I specify a container other than 'Users' for the admin account it craps out.

 

Theres a lack of good technical info, what with their forum being down. Any help would be much appreciated.

 

Leon.

[ChrisH]

You have to specify where to look for the users. This is best achieved if all the users in one group are in one container. So your path would be:

 

domain\students\year7

 

or similar or possibly the other way round

 

If you import using the NT method it does allow you to select which group to import from though!!!!!

[leon]

Thanks Chris, I can import the students by container. What I'd like to avoid is assigning them to groups in Censornet. Death by tickbox!

 

Is it possbile to have Option 6 (Retrieve User-list from a Windows Active Directory) create/assign users to a group automatically during the import process?

 

I've tried the NT method every which way, and it won't play nice. Any tips for getting this to work with a vanilla 2003 domain? I've tried making a computer object for the Censornet box, but it won't retieve the group lists.

 

Cheers,

 

Leon.

[HodgeHi]

I would like to help but i just imported each ou then while connected via webadmin used select all and move them into the appropriate group on censornet.

 

I did this for each ou.

[leon]

Hi HodgeHi,

 

You must have the patience of a saint ;-). You can only assign 30 users at a time, and you can't sort by group so you have to sift though the list with each imported OU.

 

It's looking like I'll have to bite the bullet, or try DansGuardian...

 

Thanks,

 

Leon.

[ChrisH]

You could export a list of your usernames and do a manual import. Not ideal but might save some time overall.

[HodgeHi]

I do have the patience of a saint when it comes doen to something that needs to be done but also WORKS like it should. I would like an alternative to this and have been looking at creating some sort of csv file to do it. Is there not a export option for one of the command line utils for AD to export to a csv file. Not sure what the output file is like though.

 

 

While on this subject i have just re-built a censornet server and created a back up of the previous server to restore to the new one. But when restoring it said it would automatically restart, but it did not. I then proceeded to restart manually but did not see the users in the list.

 

I then re-didi the restore and again it did not restart and also i did not see the users and computers re-entered into the list so i had to have the patience of the saint and re-enter the users into their groups. Took about 15 minutes to do re-import.

 

All you need to do is import each ou then browse the list for the (none) group users and select each one and move to appropriate groups. Not telling you thats what you should do just how i do mine at the mo.

[leon]

Thanks for your replies. I was mucking around this afternoon and came to the conclusion that it would be best to use the web gui, like you suggested Hodge. Once I've got it running smoothly, I'll be looking to import using a .csv when I need to add another year group.

 

I couldn't get the NT import to work. I guess this is because we're not running our servers in native mode, for pre-2k support. I didn't want to open that can of worms, though I wonder why they couldn't implement this feature for AD?

 

All the best.