quickly enable/ disable web access

[pheidius]

HI,

I am very much of a novice user. I have a quad 2.5 PPC tower( 150 gb raptor boot, Quadro FX4500, 4.5 gb non ecc ram, Highpoint Rocketraid 2320) It is running Mac OS X server unlimited client 10.4.10. This machine will be providing the IP addresses for 25 client imacs running Mac OS X Tiger 10.4.10 I The internet feed will be coming through one of the gigabit ethernet ports and the other will be providing services to the clients. I would like to be able to cut off web access simultaneously for all clients(middle school students) and yet retain access to the web for myself all the time. I also need them to retain access to the shares on my array all the time though. Is there a script or a command to perhaps disable port 80 simultaneously on all clients. Or is there a better way to accomplish my intent.

[Camelot]

What you don’t say is how you identify your machine from everyone else’s.

Either way there are several approaches. The most obvious would be to use the firewall to block port 80 access from any machine other than yours.

Another approach would be to use a proxy server, where the proxy server can have accounts with different privilege levels allowing you to set one set of rules for staff (e.g. any site, any time), and a different set of rules for students (limited set of sites, only certain hours, etc.)

More information about your network is needed, though, in order to advise further.

[pheidius]

My network is a school LAN. All the other machines in the building are PC’s and are on a Windows Server domain. They are all loaded up with so much security software that they are virtually unusable. My Mac has access to the internet without any security software loaded on it. I do not have access to the domain, therefore, but I don’t need or want it. So I am sitting behind a router that is dishing me an IP via a DHCP lease. The connection is cat 5e out of the wall jack. The only limitation is that there is a net nanny proxy server somewhere behind the router. As far as identifying my machine, I call it Kserver while my clients are just numbered i-mac 1-25. I had also thought of the port 80 approach but the nuance of what I need is this. As I teach. I want to have my students as a whole not to have access to the web in general. The reason for this is that they will not do any work if they do but will only constantly try to surf to places they shouldn’t be. In a normal school, this would just be a simple discipline issue, but this is an inner city school where not only is there no normal but any attempt to impose discipline beyond anything you do in your own room puts you on the “you are a bad teacher track.” So what I need, ideally, is a way to randomly bring them live to go to web sites in quick bursts right at the same time as I need it but at essentially unpredictable times in a given lesson. Some days I would never give them access, others I might for short bursts. I want to have continual assess for the server though as it is also my presentation station for my projector and big screen. That is why I wondered if there was some kind of script I could initiate from the server that would tell all clients to close down or open up port 80 with one push of a button and/ or click of a mouse. The unpredictable timing of this is why I didn’t think a proxy server would work but then again, as stated above, i am a novice admin.

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