Limiting browsers to sites

[Mark Ellis]

Stacy wrote:

>We want to limit certain of our public computers to browsing our
>catalog and specific web-based periodical indexes.

You shouldn't need any additional software to do this.

If you're using Windows, just disable DNS in the Network control Panel and
then map addresses to names for only the hosts you'd like to be accessible
in the hosts file.

On a standard NT 4.0 installation, the hosts file can be found at:

c:\winnt\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

I don't have a Windows 95 machine handy to check this but you can use Find
to locate the same file.  An example line from one of ours is:

198.112.169.67  www.searchbank.com

Add a line similar to this for each permitted host.  Use nslookup to get
the IP addresses.

This scheme will not prevent patrons from accessing sites for which they
know the IP address like this: http://206.12.173.41/, but in practice we
haven't had any problems in several months.  Also if a site on your
permitted list changes the IP address of their machine you'll need to match
the change in your hosts file.  In practice, this doesn't happen very
often, but you need to know this in case things start failing suddenly.

Hope this helps.


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Mark Ellis
Network Support Analyst                 Phone: (604) 231-6410
Richmond Public Library                 Email: mark.ellis at rpl.richmond.bc.ca
Richmond, British Columbia
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