I have a problem and I would appreciate your suggestions on how best to solve this. I have a broadband connection to my SuSE 8.1 Linux server. All the client machines on my network are either win2k or winxp. The problem I have is that each client machine has full web and email access masquerading via the linux box. So, a number of employees are spending more time sending email and surfing the web instead of working. I have made them all sign a contract that states that they mustn’t surf or send personal email during company time. This worked for a while but has again deteriorated.

What I would like to do is to set up a net filter that works on a schedule so that I can stop employees visiting specified sites (yahoo mail and hotmail) during office hours. I would prefer this to blocking the sites at all times. Someone suggested that I set up squid but I don’t see any way for squid to filter addresses let alone based on a schedule.

For email, I would like to set up a scheduled retrieval and send for some of the employees. Will sendmail and fetchmail suffice?

I would appreciate your suggestions short of firing the employees. When I can get them working, they are very good but lack self control when it cones to the internet.

Productivity goes up if employees are allowed to surf the web and use personal email from work. Keep your employees happy and they will do much better at making you rich. That is what you want is it not? But they ARE NOT your slaves.

Oh, give them linux boxes. too. That will help too.

I fully agree that happy employees are productive employees, that is why I want to restrict access only to specified sites for set periods of time. I don’t want to stop them accessing those sites during lunch, before or after work.

The problem is not the casual use of the web or the occasional personal email. The problem is the employees that spend 7 hours a day writing emails and 1 hour working. I have two employees that I get about one full days work a week from. They are not making me rich, in fact, I probably make less than you. I agree that employees are not my slaves and I don’t treat them as slaves. However, I hired them and clearly laid out the expectations. Some (not all) employees are now abusing the freedoms they were given. The assumption that all employers are evil slave drivers is wrong and narrow minded. I have made a significant investment in my company and I have employees that WANT to work for me. I give employees all the freedom they desire with the expectation that the freedom given to them will be returned in the effort them give to me. For most employees this seems to work, treat employees like valuable people and they will put in the effort for you. However, the temptation of the internet on their desktop is sometimes too much and a few employees seem unable to restrain themselves. They are good employees and I don’t want to have to fire them over something like this. The idea is to provide more structure for those individuals that need it and for those that don’t, are free to discipline themselves.

I would appreciate responses that can help me find a solution that will work technically and communally. I don’t want to have to resort to firing as a means of controlling internet use. My employees are too valuable a resource for that.

At home I use squid with the dansguardian plugin. "Dan's Guardian" is a Squid plugin for filtering sites with 'offensive' content. The filtering is done via user-defined filtering algorithms and configurable stop lists (as opposed to $$$ subscription based filters, etc). I use it on our family internet connection to help keep my kids from stumbling across the really gross stuff.

I'm not sure about the time variable capability that you want. Perhaps if you created two sets of dansguardian configuration files, then had a cron job that fired off a script that stopped-swapped configuration files-restarted the filter.

Do you use samba to connect the Win$ to your server?
with samba you can limit the access or plan the access combining that with crond.

best regards

Solution found! Thank you.

I looked at dan’s guardian but ended up trying SquidGuard first but the suggestion pointed me in the right direction. It was a bit tricky to configure but now it seems to be working and today is the first day that it is in operation company wide. So far, no complaints. Actually, I received a few thanks for instituting the porn blocking.

To get Squidguard configured, it is possible to edit the .conf file manually but it seems rather finicky and I ended up installing the webmin module for squidguard. The webmin module will let you setup a basic filter. Once you have the basic filter set up with webmin, you can then edit the files manually and add in the more complex configurations you are looking for.

Thanks for the assistance. I now have to set up sendmail and fetchmail appropriately.

While we are here I have a similar problem, linux machine (RH 9.0) as a socks server and win$ clients (about 400); I have to be able to grant access to the web just to some users connecting from their boxes.
Which program can I use (o better which program is the easiest to configure) and how to do it.
I am running RH9
Thanks in advance for any tip...
....

Hi there,

You have a couple of choices. You can install squid and set ACLs to allow access only only for specified IP addresses (and give those users fixed addresses) or possibly MAC addresses? Someone else may be able to advise if you can use MAC addresses with Squid ACLs. Alternatively (and more simply, you set squid up to use either local authentication or windows authentication.

Just FYI, if that really is RH9 and not RH Fedora 9, its ancient and hasn't been updated in years ie its wide open to exploits... recommend you upgrade eg Fedora or Centos (free version of RHEL)

That is RH 9 not Fedora because this thread is 5 years OLD.. I would hope the OP solved the issue by now...

fjordlander welcome to LQ. You might want to consider viewing the posting date in a thread before responding. !!

have you tried censornet?
there is a free version as well as paid for version. Just google for 'censornet'. Both run on Debian Linux and you can use it for controlling who has access to the Web and what level. also you can schedule for different times of the day.

Instead of doing such privation of personal services in office hours, set weekly goals or something like that, whoever does not do em, or meets the goals but very mediocre, you can fire them because they were not productive...

Because it is true... a happy worker is a productive worker... no worker is going to want to read their emails at lunch, cuz then theyll have to eat in front of the computer... and that could lead to disaster! Just my two cents

HELLO 5 year old Thread !!!! .. Let it DIE a peaceful death...

I think I'm experiencing Deja-Vu