Monday 13 June 2011

More on CCProxy and Home Web Access Management

Well I've had a 10-client license CCProxy(TM) installed and operational for twelve days now, and I simply cannot sing its praises loudly enough!
Their email support has been exemplary (even in the face of a "dumb-user-error" on my part)
Everything I have wanted it to do, ... it has done.
Three times I have wanted special functions from the product and every time it was already there, built-in and  available, with some additional explanation from the support team.
Specifically I wanted:
To be able to set up multiple time/web filters per user/device
e.g.
iPods only access web from 5am to 10:30PM M~F, cant access Facebook(TM), Tumblr(TM), Picnik(TM) during homework times
PC's access web any time, cant access Facebook(TM), Tumblr(TM), Picnik(TM) during homework times
M~F
etc
As per my first blog on this topic, they explained how that was done

I did not want each separate filter definition to consume one of my 10 user licenses
In my first blog on this subject I had said
The catch with this approach is that it appears to consume TWO client licenses so in our case we need a minimum of FOUR licenses per child (2 per iPod and two per desktop - per child) so there go eight licenses immediately. This means we are forced to buy the minimum paid license which happens to be 10-user for US$70 (as at Jun 2011). Still that is a one-off cost so for the flexibility its not bad.

i.e. When you enter an allow filter for an IP/MAC it shows a user count of 1
When you then enter a blocking filter for that same IP/MAC it shows a user count of 2
... even though its for the one user and one device
Once again, however, the authors had thought of this, because the user-count from a license perspective is the number of concurrent users accessing the system at one time.
To quote their response:
The number of accounts is based on online clients which means you can create 20 accounts, only 10 of them available at the same time.
I wanted to be able to filter the logfile analysis by pattern-matching rather than individual definitions
The drop-down filter allows filtering on any ONE of the defined User names e.g.
  User1_PC-Allow OR User1_PC-Filter OR....
Whereas I wanted all entries starting with User1 e.g.
User1_PC-Allow; AND User1_PC-Filter; AND User1_iPod-Allow; AND User1_iPod-Filter

The solution was as simple as entering the string into the "Log Analysis" "Filter" textbox then clicking  "Analysis" and waiting ... the waiting bit was what this "dumb-user" got wrong - DOH!

Two final tips for this blog:
  1. Even though the default time blocks are hour-to-hour, minuted periods can be manually specified
    e.g.
    If you use the tick-boxes to select filter times you only have 00:00~01:00, 01:00~02:00 ...22:00~23:00, 23:00~00:00. 
    You can however, specify times such as 20:00-23:30 by typing it into the daily time schedules.
  2. I found it helpful to visually record my filter definitions in an excel spreadsheet so I could visualise the times I wanted to apply filtering or blocking on

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