Help with setting up laptops to only access a couple websites

S

ScreamSalvation

New Member
I'm trying to lend a hand to a small company that is deploying 40 laptops to its employees. The laptops will all have 3G wireless cards for internet access. The company has almost no IT help at the moment so I'm trying to lend a hand. I know this is a hard problem as the internet is set up to easily access data, and in this question it is trying to be blocked and censored.

Is there a stand alone program that would easily do this, blacklist all sites but leave 10 or so accessible. If this is the best answer than the company would purchase the licenses no problem.

I have thought about OpenDNS with a premium account as it has the whitelist feature. But using 3G wireless cards I have heard that no matter what manual DNS settings you use most cellular companies hijack the DNS queries and route them to their own servers, thus defeating OpenDNS.

Also have thought about setting each computer to try and access a "fake" proxy server and then telling it not to use the proxy for those 10 addresses. This seemed flaky at best.

Basically been reading up on this matter to help these people out. Figured I'd ask for some more opinions to see if anyone had done this in the past and had any suggestions or good programs.
 
if they are using 3g then using something centralized is out of the question (ie. a firewall) Assuming you mean they each have a 3g card and not sharing 1 through a mobile router?

You could set up content advisor on IE to only allow certain sites. But if they download and install say firefox then they would be able to get to whatever. Unless you restrict their accounts enough so they cant install software.

Does that sound like a possibility?
 
Yep, all will be using seperate 3g cards so a centralized solution (that doesn't involve OpenDNS) is out of the question.

The accounts will be restricted to user accounts so they shouldn't be able to install software (correct?).

I've never had much luck using content advisor to restrict internet access. I don't know if I'm just not doing something right or what. It is a possibility though for it to be used.
 
the best thing is to make a deny all first and then start allowing sites. deny *.* then start adding in the sites you want. it isnt perfect but its free and worth a shot.
 
In my opinion the point of the company providing laptops to its employees is to boost productivity. If my company were to be so strict as to impose a supernanny configuration stricter than that even imposed on young kids--well I wouldn't be using that laptop all that much. Now that's 40 laptops that are doing zero to improve productivity.

If you treat them like animals needing to be restricted and caged then they will act like caged animals IMHO. Plus no IT support to check on that configuration. . .
 
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