Kirk Vander Meulen wrote: > I'd like to write a script that limits internet access to certain hours of > the day. This seems like it should be simple.
That's a very optimistic point of view! > Can someone point me in the right direction on this- I'm sure I can > figure out how to use a calendar object or whatever to trigger daily > events, but what's the best way to block/unblock networking? > I'm running xp (probably vista soon) on the > computer I want to do this with. Well it's quite a wide-ranging question really, in spite of the apparent simplicity of the request To start with, just how secure does the solution need to be? Enough to prevent casual trespassing? Or robust enough to stop the most determined of (maybe teenage) script-kiddie? You could, for example, have a script scheduled to disable the primary NIC's network access at a certain time. But that would only be effective as long as users couldn't undo the effect. And would also prevent access to, say, any networked printers etc. Alternatively, you might reset its gateway so that local networking would succeed but internet access would not. (This stuff you could do quite simply with WMI, including the scheduling, although I'm sure there are alternatives). But this is all moderately flimsy stuff. In short, anything you do casually under Windows -- that I can think of at any rate -- could be undone by someone who gets admin access. If you're using some kind of ADSL router to access the internet, I believe some of them come with various firewall-y functions, of which timed access might be one. Alternatively, there is a small world of products out there for content filtering, timed access etc. Don't know what your need is, but they tend to be labelled as family-oriented so searching for terms like family web filter will probably get a few hits. Feel free to come back with more info / questions. TJG _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
