View Client History

[Clark]

We have a windows 2000 server with 26 student stations
running xp pro. Is there a way I can see which web sites
students have been on?

Thanks

 

[Steven L Umbach]

It is always possible to logon to any computer as an administrator and take ownership
of a users profile, grant yourself permissions, and read history folders, not that I
am advocating that. One way would be to use a firewall device that can log traffic
based on IP addresses to the website and amount of time spent there. Then access can
be traced back to an IP address. Of course the IP addresses would need to be static
for this to be effective. If you have access to the dns server, you may be able to
view the dns server cache to see what websites have been resolved. That would not
give an indication of what user is going where and you also have to consider that if
a computer is not protected well from popups a user may find a website on his
computer that he did not initiate the connection to or possibly did a Google search
and accessed a website that was not appropriate but could not tell by the search
description. Products like ISA proxy/caching firewall from Microsoft can do a great
job of controlling user access based on user credentials and generate extensive
reports of user use. There are third party programs that may be able to do such but I
do not know of one to recommend. A Google search of "internet monitoring software"
should return plenty of results, many of which probably have trial downloads. Just be
sure to read hardware and network requirements first. --- Steve