yamahito

I was recently asked to disable internet access on a suite of macs for an exam. Easier said than done: I don’t have any router/firewall control for the network they’re on, and they would still need network printing access.

There were a few things I could have done: blocking port 80 and 443 on the machines’ local firewalls, or changing the proxy settings to point the web browsers to some bogus proxy. Problem is that the machines will need internet again within minutes of the end of the exam, and I’m just not confident enough that changing such settings won’t bugger something up.

So I went down a different route: this is a script for running at the start of an exam. It only runs on a management server with Remote Desktop, so no worries about buggering up the client machines. It monitors the current application of each machine, and if someone runs firefox or safari, it will log their machine name, the application, and the timestamp, then bring up an observation window on their computer.
(more…)

Well, no luck on the apple forums, so I’ve resorted to working around the problem I talked about yesterday.
(more…)