We have around 50 W2K/XP workstations (5 W2K servers) behind a SonicWall firewall. We do not have content filtering on the firewall and since we do not have any company policy on internet usage I am unable to get our subscription ugraded to include this.
However, one thing I would really like to do is to block file sharing sites like LimeWire, BearShare etc. I thought one idea might be to somehow use a script or Group Policy to deploy a Hosts file to each machine on the network with the following entries:
127.0.0.1 www.limewire.com
127.0.0.1 www.bearshare.com
etc…
Whether this would have been a good idea or not, the boss says no because the HOSTS file on a lot of machines are actually used by their quote vendors like Bloomberg, Reuters etc and these cannot be altered/replaced.
So basically my question is, are there any ideas for blocking certain websites on all machines when this cannot be done either at the firewall or by using a blanket HOSTS file?
Any suggestions most welcome
