I look after a wireless network for a family with a teenage son. Said son has
a PC which connects to his (secured) home network, but which can also connect
to an unsecured network nearby. The family wish to restrict his net access to
certain times of day, but he is getting around this by connecting to the
unsecured network. The company with the unsecured network are not interested
in locking it down despite the risks.
Any ideas how the son's PC can be made to connect only to his home network?
It runs XP Pro, and the home net has static addressing, WPA, and MAC
filtering (so I'm not worried about others getting in, only him getting out).
The son has admin rights on his PC, so I'm looking for something like an
obscure registry hack that I can apply without him noticing.

Show quote Hide quote If they truly desire to restrict his access it first begs the question. Why
on earth does he have admin rights?????

As long as he has admin rights and what appears to be a better grasp of the
computer and its workings than the others in his household there's probably
not alot you can do to reign him in lol. Take away the admin rights and
there are simple restrictions that can be implemented to keep him from
manipulating the connection and therefore off the other net, or there are a
number of utilities that can be used to simply limit his access to the PC
itself during those times when he is circumventing the time limits of his
own wireless access by using the resources of neighboring networks. Even
NetNanny can do it. But I think even with a seperate parental pw for
netnanny he could probably disable it as long as he has admin rights on the
machine.

BTW that neighboring company is more than a tad clueless if they're running
a wide open wireless system!

The family has parenting issues that cannot be resolved with a
technological solution.  if he's using the Internet when he's not supposed
to be, then only a behavioral adjustment can be successful.

With administrative rights, he can undo anything you can do, and will
probably find that undo very quickly.  Taking away his administrative
access is no solution.  Anyone who has physical access has total access. 
Methods for gaining an administrator-level password are posted in these
newsgroups nearly every day.


Jaws <J***@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote:

My kids are not that geeky and I can take away there admin rights and give
them a limited account.  However, under the default limited account in XP
Pro, the user can still right click on Wireless Network Connection and see
"View Available Wireless Networks."  How do you create a custom security
profile that will not allow this?

Richard

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