Re: [OT] Banning access to certain websites

["Mark Harrison (Groups)" <mph@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Ho yin Ng wrote:

>I can only find somewhere to block ip addresses. How do you find the ip
>address of certain websites?
>
>
>
Ho Yin,

You can find the IP address, associated with a website, say,
www.knightharrison.com, by opening up a command prompt and typing

PING www.knightharrison.com

This will give you a response like

Pinging www.knightharrison.com [216.66.18.192]

then some other stuff that you can ignore.

The problem, however, is that some machines host more than one website.
For example, www.mog007.com is ALSO hosted on that server.

If you block by IP address, then you end up blocking both sites. In some
cases, it may be what you want. In others, you may be throwing out the
baby with the bathwater. Perhaps you wanted to allow access to
KnightHarrison.com because you wanted access to their downloads, but
didn't want your staff wasting their time thinking about classic car
events, so wanted to block mog007.com

The solution is to persuade the PC that www.mog007.com points to a
different IP address, such as 127.0.0.1 (your local machine.)

How you do that depends on what operating system you're running, but in
Windows, you can add the line

127.0.0.1   www.mog007.com

to the file c:\winnt\system32\drivers\etc\hosts      (replace
C:\winnt with wherever Windows is installed)

and then run NBTSTAT -R (the R must be a capital)

If you're running a bigger network, you can do this for everyone by
changing the "DNS server", but I suspect that this is for your
home PC?


When I was at BP, during the 1998? soccer world cup, BP redirected the
official World Cup site to an internal webpage that read "we have
blocked this site - if you wish to have it re-enabled for your PC,
please contact the Vice President for IT Security" :-)

M.