Disallow CNN.com except at specific times 1

[kmortelite]

Hi!

In XP, is there a way I can disallow specific websites without using a third-party firewall?

My brother-in-law wants me to disable cnn except for two small windows of time each day on his machine so he can get more work done (he's an ADDICT). If I use a 3rd party firewall, he'll be able to turn it off quickly and easily.

What I intend to do is write a script that runs in the XP task scheduler (which he doesn't know about) to turn it on and off.

I've tried changing the "hosts" file and "lmhosts.sam" to point him back to localhost when he tried to go to cnn.com, but cnn still came up.

I thought about putting bogus DNS entries in his cache, but don't know how in XP, and even when I ran ipconfig /flushdns, cnn would still resolve and wouldn't put another entry in the ipconfig /displaydns list (I don't know why. I thought it should).

This would be an easy problem to solve in Linux, just modify the TCP/IP protocol stack to check if it's within allowable time any time he tries to access cnn, but can I do that in Windows?

Any thoughts?

--K/\/\ort D

 

[Serbtastic]

I don't know how you edited your local hosts file, but when I added the following line to mine I could not get to cnn.com:

127.0.0.1 cnn.com

http://www.cnn.com

 

[bcastner]

The ".sam" versions of HOSTS and LMHOSTS are sample files. True HOSTS and LMHOSTS files have no extensions.

Besides, LMHOSTS has nothing to do with the internet.