Hi,

I have a little brother who I want to connect to our wireless broadband internet connection. I would like to know if it could be possible to restrict access so he can not use any browser except for aol (so i can set parental controls and to see what sites he is accessing along with bad pop-ups...and downloads....)? If so, how do I go about doing this? His computer is running Windows XP SP2 and our network is wireless...

nikkisboricua

You could try using these programs, I've heard some good reviews on them. Atleast one of them should give you the option of blocking other programs trying to access port 80 or whatever the HTTP (internet) port is. Good luck!


www.access-control-software.com

http://www.aupaction.com/

http://www.codework.com

Shane McP

Hi. Thanks for the reply, but I need something to block all internet traffic except for AOL. Any other ideas?

I'd have to do some research on the specifics, but you can lock down Windows machines to only allow certain programs to run under specific users. If you wanted to take the time learning how to do it, you could use Windows to do all the restrictions for you.

This document seems like a good place to start. By using the Group Policy Editor, you can restrict access to certain core Windows functions. From there, you should be able to find out how to really tighten down the machine to almost be an AOL browser appliance.

I just found the major key to getting what you want. This page will explain how to prevent a user from running any programs other than the listed ones. Be very careful with this. What you will want to do is have an administrator user that you can use so you can access everything and have another user that represents your brother's access that has the restrictions applied to it. If you apply the restrictions to the main account and you mess up, you could have a messy clean up on your hands. You will also want to make sure that your brother's account is not in the Administrators group.