Limiting browsers to sites - Windows 95

[Mark Ellis]

WebFerLibbers,

Now that I've tried it, I can be more specific about Windows 95.

1. Copy c:\windows\Hosts.sam to c:\windows\Hosts  (ie. drop the extension)

2. Edit the newly saved file with Notepad and add add a line for each host
to which you're permitting access.

It should look like this if you're permitting access to IAC Searchbank only:

127.0.0.1       localhost
198.112.169.67  www.searchbank.com
198.112.169.66  sbweb2.med.iacnet.com
198.112.169.67  sbweb3.med.iacnet.com

(leave the localhost line as is)

3. Go to TCP/IP properties in the Network control panel and disable DNS on
the DNS Configuration tab.

4. Restart the machine.

5. Test both permitted and denied sites.

6. If it works, ask for a raise equivalent to the value of the third party
software required to accomplish the same thing.

Here's yesterday's post, so all this stuff is in one place:

>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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