Just a short, simple blog for Bob to share his thoughts.
11 February 2016 • by Bob • Windows
One of the things about being an ubergeek is setting up a full Active Directory Domain to manage all of the computers in my house and running my own proxy server to provide Internet access for our home network. I am currently using Microsoft's Threat Management Gateway (TMG), and before that I was using Microsoft's Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server - both of which have allowed me to do some fun things.
For example, for one whole year I intercepted all requests for the Google website and sent them to a website which I had created that looked and acted like Google but used the Bing API to provide the results. (No one could tell the difference, and I eventually wrote a blog about my experiment called Fun with Search Engines.)
At other times I would intercept my kids' Internet requests and send them to a "Your Internet is Turned Off" page when they failed to complete their chores; this was often met with much grumbling on their part. (Although one of my daughters learned how to pirate a neighbor's unsecured WiFi connection, and I was too proud of her ingenuity to get upset at her for skirting around the house rules.)
Running my own proxy server was good for accountability, too: I created a program which crawled all of the proxy server logs and created detailed reports that were dumped in a public share so everyone in the family could see where everyone else was browsing. (I'm a parent - so there is no such thing as "Private Browsing" in my house.)
That being said, I recently ran into a situation where I felt it necessary to interfere with the Internet for a few days. I had seen too many people post spoilers on Facebook about who died on The Walking Dead, and my wife saw too many spoilers about what was happening on Downton Abbey. With that in mind, when Star Wars VII was hitting the theaters, I decided that I needed to block Facebook for a few days.
But I couldn't just "block" Facebook, I needed to have fun with it... so I did this - I sent all requests for Facebook to the following page until my wife and I had a chance to see Star Wars:
http://www.geekybob.com/star-wars-warning.htm
Yeah, it's a really simple script - but it did the trick. ;-)