Ian (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
lovingboth) wrote2003-11-20 03:58 pm
lovingboth) wrote2003-11-20 03:58 pm
Internet access auditing geekery request
The set up: six Win98SE PCs get their internet access via a Win2kPro PC running Internet Connection Sharing.
Our internet access policy says we could monitor what use is made of it. In practice at the moment we don't, beyond a quick weekly look at IE's history and cache. As I'm pretty sure that no-one's clued up enough to delete a subset of that (all of it disappearing would be very suspicious) I'm reasonably happy.
But the question of 'if we could, why don't we?' has come up. Resources, particularly in money, time and effort is my polite answer at the moment, but it has made me wonder about what could be done.
It needs to be extremely low cost - superwhizzo programs costing $1,000 are out.
And 'net nanny' or image filtering programs are also out - part of the job does involve looking at sites that'd get people in most workplaces in trouble. I've joked that if a page doesn't have an erect penis on, it should be against our policy as it's clearly not work-related...
One way to do it would be to run a proxy server on the Win2k PC, but it's running at quite high levels of resources use already (it's all ancient kit: this K6-III/400 is easily the fastest...)
Of the monitoring programs, >Canary has caught my eye, except that it doesn't run on Win2k, and I can see 'our access is being monitored, but not your access' being an issue. Even if I might appreciate it :)
http://www.alphalink.com.au/~sergeb/Canary.htm
Any other suggestions?
Our internet access policy says we could monitor what use is made of it. In practice at the moment we don't, beyond a quick weekly look at IE's history and cache. As I'm pretty sure that no-one's clued up enough to delete a subset of that (all of it disappearing would be very suspicious) I'm reasonably happy.
But the question of 'if we could, why don't we?' has come up. Resources, particularly in money, time and effort is my polite answer at the moment, but it has made me wonder about what could be done.
It needs to be extremely low cost - superwhizzo programs costing $1,000 are out.
And 'net nanny' or image filtering programs are also out - part of the job does involve looking at sites that'd get people in most workplaces in trouble. I've joked that if a page doesn't have an erect penis on, it should be against our policy as it's clearly not work-related...
One way to do it would be to run a proxy server on the Win2k PC, but it's running at quite high levels of resources use already (it's all ancient kit: this K6-III/400 is easily the fastest...)
Of the monitoring programs, >Canary has caught my eye, except that it doesn't run on Win2k, and I can see 'our access is being monitored, but not your access' being an issue. Even if I might appreciate it :)
http://www.alphalink.com.au/~sergeb/Canary.htm
Any other suggestions?
no subject
How about...
That has some sort of page / activity monitoring on it for what the clients access..
And has a 30 day download, and is easy to run.
no subject
I have no knowledge of adminning Windows, but can you try putting a proxy on and see what results you get - after all, these are often used to improve performance. And a [well-written] proxy should hardly use any CPU - it's just moving files from disk to network and back...
Just a guess.
no subject
Off topic
Laurence