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Hi, Our lovely IT students love playing minecraft, but we cant figure out a way to block the Java program without effect the rest of windows. Normally we would block the exe of a game via sophos application control, but doesn't seem to work on this. Any ideas?

Morning all! New to EduGeek. I wondered if anyone has recently been successful at blocking google search query games like: Snake, Pacman...etc I can't just block the search query for "snake", plus no matter how you type snake, it will give you the game to play on a desktop or mobile/tablet. Using Lightspeed Filtering & Sonicwall Firewall... Not sure what to do!

Hi Guys, I have been given a bunch of laptops from a school to set up for 'exam use'. The only application that is needed is Wordpad. Everything else removed/blocked. What is the best way to configure this? I've tried configuring wordpad to be the only application allowed through GPO but after applying this the preloaded windows 10 apps can still run. I tried running 'Get-AppxPackage -AllUsers | Remove-AppxPackage' in powershell but this runs fine but does nothing. I then tried Kiosk mode but cant seem to use wordpad with this. I am currently looking into another app to use for this while I wait for the restore to finish where i accidentally locked myself out of all gpo settings.. These laptops are on Windows 10 for Education OS. Any help with this will be greatly appreciated. Many thanks! Tom.

Hi all, First, some context. I'm in a university environment, under a central IT department. For the most part I have control over the School's image, Group policy, and physical hardware. Not so much when it comes to an network infrastructure and network services. Now, for my question. I have a mobile laptop lab, which instructors borrow when their class needs the laptops. During exams the instructors ask if the internet can be disabled so ensure student integrity. I need a quick way to disable the internet access while still allowing connection to some network shares. Most people say configuring a proxy in Group policy or something like that but I rather something along the lines of a script that I can run to "turn it off" and script to "turn it back on." Because the laptops are wireless, group policy timing can be finicky and I only need to turn it off for a few hours at most. Any ideas? Thx

At the moment I've got a banned internet group which reads a group policy that uses a dummy proxy. This works, however when the user sees this page can not be displayed, the user can click the link on the page that says "Diagnose Connections problems". As we have wpad in place when the banned user clicks on the diagnose link internet explorer ticks the "Automatically detect settings" box even though this is disabled in the banned policy. This then allows them to browse the internet as normal. We're tried to find a group policy for this and even installed the latest admin templates no joy. The reason we're tried to avoid banning the iexplore.exe is because if the student is using Dreamweaver and wants to test their page. Help!!!

I personally believe that the Internet would not run without the aid of advertising... in the same way as commercial TV wouldn't. I also believe that students don't find them particularly distracting either. I'm not talking about EduGeek or any other particular site here, but what are people's views on Internet advertising? I'm particularly interested in people's opinions on adverts that support educational resources - things like Teachers.TV, TeachTube, Teach-ICT, etc. Do you think that sites will ever begin to prevent access to those users that decide not to display there ads? Given the choice, would you remove/block ads?

Good morning All, Really hope you can help. I have a new technician who is of the 'always on social media' age. I'm about to have a word with them regarding the amount of time they spend on Facebook, or more accurately, Messenger. It is banned for everyone in the school (students, staff, admin, SLT, etc) except for us two. If it comes to it, is there a way of blocking Facebook/Messenger in Smoothwall by IP address? So I can block access from their office computer. I'm not a Smoothwall expert and have recently taken over the NM role. I assume that our sysadmin accounts are added to an exemption group. I would like them to still have full access to the internet (research and downloading drivers, etc) but no access to Facebook/Messenger. Is this possible? Thanks for reading, C

Hi all, Is anyone willing to send me a copy/post HTML of their custom block page for Smoothwall Guardian or advise how to do it. I'm properly stuck. Smoothwall support say they don't help with it !!!!!!!!!!! Cheers

Windows 2008 Domain ISA Server 2006 running on Server 20003 XP Workstations I'm looking to block the internet access based on OUs at set times - mainly lunch, I know the internet can be blocked at set times easily using ISA Server, but can't find a way of doing it for specific times, e.g. our lunch time is 1315-1415 I'd rather use ISA if anyone can suggest away around its rather restrictive hourly slots... Keen to hear any/all suggestions

Hello Wondering if anyone could help, we are struggling to block the settings button within chrome for all students. We have previously used the Block access to a list of URL's within Group Policy but this is no longer working (Any of the blocked URL's) Is there another GP that we can enable to disable the settings button? OS : W10 Chrome Version : 111.0.5563.66

Is it me or is it a massive oversight that we cannot force safety mode on through our filtering boxes? I know the standard reply is "education mode" but at secondary level its really not practical to have to whitelist all the videos anyone might ever want to watch on the site which has all the videos in the world on. I know safety mode is not infallible but surely its a great deal better than the "unfiltered" version. I have posted a question on the Youtube forum. I'm not holding my breath for a reply from anyone at google, but perhaps if you agree that this cookie setting is terribly impractical then you could look at commenting/starring my post to try and get some attention from it: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!category-topic/youtube/BdCO_0waxgU I'm using a Fortigate box to filter internet here. If anyone has a suggestion on how I can sort this out another way I'd be pleased to hear it! Chris

We have just moved from Windows 7 to Windows 10, and staff are suddenly facing an issue whereby USB-powered 'Hard Disk Drives' do not show up in This PC, but small/typical USB sticks show up fine. In other words, small USB sticks work fine, but the big block USB drives do not appear. Administrators can see them all fine, but network users cannot. What policy could be blocking this? From Group Policy, we only hide/disable the C drive.

We are using Bing strict search as it seemed more secure on a number of key words then google image with forced safe search. The search term is "money euro" which should not be an issue. 5th row down is some dodgey NSFW images hosted by PicShare - Image Hosting and Image Upload When you click the image (wanted to check if the host was blocked or not) bing brings up a close up of the previous image and seems to 'ignore' the main search results in this pages results summary in the header. I have reported the image to Bing CS.

Hi, I would like to find out how other schools are tackling the following problem. We have been blocking IP address browsing for a while now due to having a large number of infections coming from websites using IP addresses as opposed to URL's. All of these websites seem to impersonate "My Computer" for Windows XP and make you think that your PC is infected and usually install an infection which poses as an antivirus. We are using Bloxx Web Filter which has an antivirus built in (I can't remember which one it uses) and Symantec Endpoint Protection and neither of them were catching the infections. I spoke to Symantec on a few occasions and their answer is always "download this tool and it will remove the infection for you". But if that's the case, what's the point in having Symantec Endpoint Protection if it doesn't stop infections and instead I have to download a tool and manually remove the infection every 5 minutes? I've also spoken to Bloxx and they just ask me for the address so they can add it to their URL database. But there are so many of them and it wouldn't surprise me if they are continuously changing their addresses, so this isn't going to help much. The problem we have now is that websites such as BBC iPlayer and S4C Clic stream all of their media from IP addresses. So staff are now understandably unhappy because they can't access videos they want to use in their lessons. I agree that they should be able to use these two websites in particular (maybe some others too). I thought of simply unblocking the specific IP addresses used by these two websites, but first of all I don't have a list of them (and neither do Bloxx) and second, even if I can get hold of a list I don't know if or how often these addresses are going to change. This isn't going to be any good if teachers are planning their lessons around these videos only to find that on the day the IP's have changed and the videos are blocked again. So my questions are: 1) Is anybody else having/had the problem with these viruses coming from IP based websites? (I have seen similar websites using URL's but the majority seem to be IP addresses.) - a) Do you have a solution for this problem other than blocking IP addresses? 2) Is there anybody blocking IP addresses with a solution for allowing BBC iPlayer and S4C Clic? 3) How many schools are blocking IP addresses? Are we part of a small group or do most schools do this? 4) Does anybody have any other tips or advice? Thanks in advance, Daniel

Hello, I have tried to search for an answer to this but not had any luck so am hoping someone on here can help... We have just implemented the blocking of USB Storage Devices on our School Computers. As was expected there are exceptional circumstances that require the use of a USB Device to be allowed (Microbits being just one). So we have gone with a Whitelist approach using USBDLM on the Windows PCs. All working no problems. Unfortunately, we are not having much luck applying the same rules to the Chromebooks/boxes. In the Google Admin Console, we can see that in the user based settings we are able to 1 - allow USBs, 2 - allow USBs but read-only and 3 - block USBs altogether. Not exactly what we are after.In the Device settings there is a setting that is called USB Detachable Whitelist. This sounds like it should do what we need but unfortunately it doesn't appear to be the case. Regardless of what Vendor and PID details we enter the devices we do NOT want to be accessible are still showing up in the File app! So I guess the question is, has anyone been able to block USB devices but Whitelist a particular device(s) in ChromeOS? Hopefully someone has understood the problem I am facing and might have a solution or at the very least it would be nice to know that it's not just us with this issue. Thanks in advance.

Hi all, First, some context. I'm in a university environment, under a central IT department. For the most part I have control over the School's image, Group policy, and physical hardware. Not so much when it comes to an network infrastructure and network services. Now, for my question. I have a mobile laptop lab, which instructors borrow when their class needs the laptops. During exams the instructors ask if the internet can be disabled so ensure student integrity. I need a quick way to disable the internet access while still allowing connection to some network shares. Most people say configuring a proxy in Group policy or something like that but I rather something along the lines of a script that I can run to "turn it off" and script to "turn it back on." Because the laptops are wireless, group policy timing can be finicky and I only need to turn it off for a few hours at most. Any ideas? Thx

Hi USB is open to all students and teachers and we don't have any encryption methods in place for the USB. what is your advise on Blocking USB for students and teachers. how do you do it in your school. is there any legal / Ofsted requirements. We have Citrix Virtual desktop access for the students and teachers. Thanks