Whitelist - anyone have experience?

[Naughty Thoughts]

Apologies to the non-tech people, this is a geek-speak post.

For those who use computers a lot, has anyone had good experience with a Whitelist program suitable for both Windows and Mac?

We have two computers out in the lounge that anyone can plonk down and start using but some people are using them for non-work purposes (such as good-old bandwidth-hugry YouTube). The computers are intended for the girls to use so they can access the forum and Langtrees and such, so we need to make sure that we block out access to other sites.

Normally I'd put something like this onto our firewall, but it's just those two computers that require the locks, rather than every computer in the building.

Anyone have any suggestions? At this stage we prefer a whitelist rather than a blacklist.

 

[Fudd]

LR - you might consider looking at de-linking them from the server so that they are 2 stand alone computers. As I understand it, licence and security issues are governed by the number of computers rather than if they are connected to a server. Updates would require these computers be looked at individually rather than updating the products through the server so that it applies across the board to all network linked computers.

If this is a possible solution, then restrictions should be possible without hampering other network computers.

Just a thought

 

[garibaldi]

not ideal, but you could modify the hosts file

ie
youtube.com 127.0.0.1

====

Are you just using internet explorer? Look at using the Content Advisor
and add the websites you want to allow, eg langtrees.com
all other sites would require a password (eg news.com.au)

 

[Naughty Thoughts]

The two options are to put the block in on the actual computers or in the network after the computers but before the server / modem.

I can create a bottleneck easily enough by installing a router with blocking on it between the lounge computers and the rest of the network but the one I have available only supports a blacklist.

I've been looking at various software options that I can install onto the computers, and NetNanny is out in front at the moment. The home version is cheap enough but we'd need to use the ContentProtect Pro version for small businesses - which is overkill for this setup. Especially since I'd need to get two versions - one for the Windows machine and another for the Mac.

It'll probably be cheaper to pick up a new router with a built-in whitelist option and insert a bottleneck. Or a second NIC for one of our spare computers and install IPCop on it.

 

[Langtrres VIP Perth 4]

What is a white list?

 

[Bianca]

Thanks for that info

 

[Naughty Thoughts]

What is a white list?

In context, a whitelist is a list of approved sites and all other sites are blocked. This means that computer can access what is on the list, but not anything else.

The opposite, a blacklist, is a list of blocked sites and everything else is allowed. So the computer can access everything, except what is on the list.

What garibaldi suggested is a blacklist - for example, I could put YouTube, MySpace and Telstra on the list. This would mean anyone trying to visit YouTube would just get a message saying "Sorry, blocked". However, they could still go and visit the dozens of other video sites, defeating the purpose.

With a whitelist, I could put the main sites those computers are supposed to visit (langtrees, talkinsex, cracker, etc) and attempts to visit other sites (such as the previously mentioned other dozen video sites) would be blocked. This way I wouldn't need to write out a list of hundreds of sites to block.