At 04:10 AM 3/4/2004, you wrote:
>2. This would enable me to create custom template.html files for the
>staff, as I can give them a different language setting to use.
>Currently I'm having to expose students to the 'bypass' link, which
>is not enabled for them.

I'm avoiding the template.html file entirely and redirecting the blocked
user to a CGI app. The CGI handles displaying the page and generating the
bypass if appropriate. This give me the same features as pure DG, with a
lot of flexibility that DG will (hopefully) never provide.

>The other feature request I'd like to make - Is it possible for the
>banned page message to have a password area, so that I can do an
>admin override? For example, we sometimes allow sites to be used for
>5 mins (literally), 30 mins, etc. It would be easy for us to go to
>the computer concerned, type in a password, and allow them to access
>that one site for a specified duration. This is instead of
>unblocking that site for everybody, restarting the DG service, then
>reblocking it later, and restarting the service.

See above. This is exactly what we do. The CGI script looks up the user's
IP address in our Radius database and, either shows no bypass option, asks
for a password, or allows bypass unconditionally depending on the user's
settings in the database.

>This brings me to my next question. Currently we use email to
>perform this operation. However, I'd love for the perl script to
>enter the requests into a MySQL database, and for the webmin module
>to interface with the database so that we can manage requests from
>there. Has anybody thought about doing this?

Yep. But nobody has yet (a) needed it badly enough to do it AND (b) had a
generic enough case that it was worth publishing. See my notes about a CGI
script above. We have a link that users click on to report false positives
which sends us an email, etc. That could easily be expanded to (a) look in
a database and report whether the report has previously been rejected, and
(b) add the reported link to the database for later handling.

--Ernest