I really don’t know where to take this enquiry- on this forum, on any
Novell forum, or on some other site. Google searches galore have all
drawn a total blank (but maybe I’m using the wrong search terms). I
wonder if any of you good people could point me in the right direction?
I don’t mind doing research for myself, but I’m tripping up on how to
even start. If I should go to some other specific forum, please let me
know.
The subject line is relevant. We’re talking school children. They need
to have unlimited access to the school computers during lesson time.
They are permitted access to school computers during their free time.
Therein lies the question. This is a Novell-based system with volatile
user accounts for pupils, and I would like some automated,
minimal-human-intervention-required-once-set-up method to, at the least,
keep track of how much free time use each child is making of the
computers and, ideally, to be able to set a weekly limit so that they
would be shut out of the system once they had used up their fair,
reasonable and healthy share of the time.
Lesson time use should not be affected by any free time use.
Pupils may log on to any computer available, so logging needs to be
done in a way that allows a central tally to be made.
Time periods covered do not fit into exact quarter/half/full hour
slots.
I do have a way of restricting internet use specifically. I’m looking
at any use of the computer, not just Internet access, and a solution
that is capable of forcing log-off at the end of the allocated time.
None of the parental control programs or internet cafe programs I have
trialled or read about have been able to cope with all these
requirements. Either they could not cope with the time allocation only
applying to certain times of the day, or they could only control within
full-hour blocks, or they could only keep track of time on one
individual workstation not time spread between multiple workstations, or
more than one of the above.
In searching the forums I did come across a way of centrally recording
the log-in times of users, which would partly handle being able to keep
track of computer use, but it would not allow for those pupils who
(despite rules) log other pupils in for them within lesson time and then
leave those accounts logged in ready for free time (which would only be
tracked as lesson time use), and use various other tricks they think we
don’t know about and find alternatives to as soon as they realise we do.
If there’s nothing else, I will try that as a starting point.
Does anyone know of anything that could do the job, that will work
within a Novell server/Zenworks/Windows workstation environment? Any
plugins, software packages, anyone that’s done something similar,
anywhere that I could start looking other than parental control/internet
cafe solutions, any of those two that I missed which will do what I
need? Anyone?
Thanks for your time if you waded through all that, and thank you in
advance for any suggestions for things I haven’t already throught to try
or places to look that haven’t occurred to me.
–
portregis
portregis’s Profile: http://forums.novell.com/member.php?userid=66568
View this thread: http://forums.novell.com/showthread.php?t=463839