We have a few users here who are using Facebook during working hours and their productivity is through the floor, as a temporary measure I have remotely edited their hosts files to point facebook.com and its various subdomains to point to the loopback address and then manually comment out at lunch time so they can use it.
This is obviously a bit tiresome doing this for a number of users every day.
I am looking at trying to find something that can do this blocking automatically on schedule.
I was thinking some kind of proxy server which i can add to the proxy settings on their browser via group policy.
Does anyone know of any free or cheapish software solution for windows that will do this? Or maybe something standalone I can install on a PC/VM?
I guess I could always write and schedule some batch files to switch a blocked hosts file with a non blocked one.
Network is Windows 2003 SBS server, Windows XP sp3 workstations, single interface on server Netgear DG834 router which whilst it does have some scheduling it doesn't allow setting of a window only single block window – for example 9-5pm, but I would want to open it in the middle.
Best Answer
If what you're doing right now is working but the issue that it's taking too much of your time, then scheduled tasks are you friend :)
Pop the two versions of the hosts file on the network somewhere (With FB enabled/disabled), and then set up a scheduled task, pushed out by GPO.
At lunch time (say, 11:30) it copies the "FB Enabled"
hostsfile, and then after lunch (say, 13:30) it copies the "FB Disabled"hostsfile.Price: $free
Difficult: Easy
Effectiveness: Good
Management Overhead: Medium
For the record, squillman's answer is the one I would prefer as a sysadmin, but we all know that's not the way it works in real life