Network Computing is part of the Informa Tech Division of Informa PLC

This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them. Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.

St. Bernard's iPrism Clears Up Web Filtering Job for Small Organizations: Page 3 of 5

St. Bernard recommends choosing automatic updates and scheduling them for nonpeak hours. The client side initiates a request to St. Bernard's servers and after both the server and the client verify each other and exchange the handshake information, a secure session is established and Filter Lists are updated.

Sites containing pornography, nudity, hacking information and a few more predefined categories are blocked under the BlockOffensive profile. In addition to blocking the active profile, iPrism monitors the rest of the categories by IP address and user names. Its integration with Active Directory and LDAP makes it easy to track activities by IP addresses or users once they authenticate through the directory service they use.

Block, Filter, Pass

I set up the network configuration from a console using a serial port (9600,8,N,1) and HyperTerminal. Next I accessed the Java-based console via Web browser and began to work the default profiles containing the filtering policies and access lists. I allowed access to certain categories -- hacking sites, for example -- to be available during specified hours. iPrism performed as advertised: If a user tried to access a site that was blocked, he or she received a configurable, default Web page, telling him or her the site was inaccessible.