Limit internet access for certain hosts during certain time
 

Hi all!

A silly question but was hoping that someone can point me in the direction of an answer. I would like to limit some hosts in internet usage during the business hours. The set up is as follows - network of about 20 machines connecting trough Debian box. 17 machines should not have internet access during the business hours, remaining should, but all have to be able to connect to the mail server.

Please Help

Thanks

i16978

A sort of a workaround would be to use to different iptables scripts and switching between them with cron jobs running at certain times.
Hmm, must be a better way to do this, but it should work.

If the devices do not require ANY network access, then you can use access control lists. If they still need LAN access, e.g .printers, then I assume you still will want the boxes to have network access and just want to lock down HTTP surfing. In that case you could set up a proxy server. I believe you'd need a cron job to start and stop the proxy server at the appropriate times. This would probably be easier to configure on your internet gateway than on 17 different PCs.