Allowing access to Facebook and Twitter

[lhank]

We have a setup where we restrict users access to personal and social sites like twitter and facebook to lunchtimes and out of hours, which is working fine using a schedule.

We however have a select group of users who require full time access to facebook and twitter for the Council pages/accounts (only those sites).

I have tried setting up a rule to allow the Active directory group access to the facebook and twitter applications, but it does not work, it needs web browsing, but then allows that group anywhere.

How can I allow a group of users just to access facebook and twitter in addition to their normal access. Would URL filtering be best ?

Thanks

Lee Hancock

[skrall · Accepted solution]

You will want to create a rule that allows "source users = Your_group", App = facebook, twitter, whatever" and apply a schedule.

Create 2 or more rules with "App = Web Browsing, SSL". Each one of these web browsing rules can have a different "Source user = ??" and a different URL filtering policy. You can also apply schedules to  to each of the web browsing rules. You should not need URL filters for Facebook or Youtube. And your Facebook and Youtube policues do not require web-brosing.

Steve Krall

[lhank]

Hi Steve,

I've looked at the rules again, and based on your reply, got it straight in my head.

Thanks very much for your help.

Lee Hancock

[comptech]

I have a PA-500

I have created a "FaceBookers" AD group that contains users allowed to use facebook.

I have also created a policy:

fromTrust to Untrust, Any source, FaceBookers, any destination, SocialNetworking application (64 results incl facebook, myspace,...), any service, Allow, none 24hrs Daily sched.

1) Why are users who are not a part of FaceBookers group still able to access the site?

2) This is all due to the fact we have OS 10.5 Mac's onsite that we need to restrict Facebook access to.  Since they do not log into the domain, we cannot restrict via username alone.  Any suggestions there?

- Trevor

[comptech]

Nevermind,  I forgot the Deny all others rule after my allow one. works like a charm (except for Mac client exceptions)

[ptarnowski]

You can allow the specific sites for twitter.com and facebook.com in your policies.  This will allow you to control them via Apps without needing to open up everything else.