Controlling Users web access

If you are using a windows 2000 network infrastructure, you can control web access using a firewall or proxy service. pesonally, we use isa server 2000 since it integrates well with our active directory. i am able to set who is allowed to go online,which online applications are allowed at what time. i can also generate a monitoring report on which site is the most frequently visited, etc. on the other hand, you can try other third-party non-microsoft fire software available.

Any good Internet proxy appliance or software will give you the ability to manage the web access, as will most good firewalls give you some access management capabilities.

However, if what you want to do is to monitor the actual usage there are some good monitoring programs. One site I worked at used a product called WebTrends (by Trend Micro I think, not positive) that gave reports on whos visited what web site and who visited our web sites (hosted in our gateway). This had a lot of capabilities so that we could set it to monitor all traffic or specific types of traffic, and can even send the reports to designated people or put them up as a web site within the gateway.

Is is posible to have a packet sniffer on a network controlled by a switch and where the main gateway is a Cisco router?