If you are an IT you’ll know by now it is a huge hassle to try and control the users. Protest everywhere!! They think your job solely revolves around making sure the MSN messenger is working. Anyway that is another topic.
I needed to monitor the Internet activities of our precious users. It is an easy to install application, though if you read their manuals you’ll go crazy. Too much information. I really hate doing that, especially when I am intrigued with all the features and I have to go through stack of manuals. Enter their website, choose a local partner. They can send you a demo CD or it can be downloaded from the main site. Then you register for a 1 month trial key. After I finished setting up, I called a local partner regarding some inquires, I discovered they can come and install the whole thing for you!! There are different components and different setups. All Websense components can be installed on one server or distributed, again depends on the size of your organization. Remember they offer many features and products but I only tested their web filtering feature.
Since we don’t have the proper equipment to test we had to work around that. I found a DELL desktop. I upgraded the RAM to 2GB. The processor is Intel Pentium 4 (2.4 GHz), I know (o_o) remember work around. The Hard Disk space was 40 GB by the end of 3 weeks period it ran out of free space. It depends on your organization and the load of your traffic. Formatted the PC and installed a Windows Server 2003 Edition OS. You can use others, but this is what we have the license to, plus I am more familiar with Windows OS. Installed Microsoft Database engine MSDN because it’s free 
It’s beautiful easy to use software. You organization network structure dictates the deployment on Websense. You want to do minimal changes. So if your switches support port mirroring you can go this way. Configure your switch to mirror all traffic going to your network’s gateway to another port and connect Websense server to that port. If Websebse server goes down it won’t affect your network’s functionality. In Websense you have to set the network interface you want to monitor, of course start by one. Another thing, if you don’t have active directory (AD) don’t worry. Just specify the range of you whole network IP. You can segment if you want, this is a nice move if you want to have group rules. Goes without saying, everything is allowed for Network Admins
All websites are categorized, not to mention anything can be over-written. For example, you can block a whole category, but allow certain websites. All websites are categorized manually and not by some algorithms. These updates can be downloaded. Some application are predefined, messenger, peer-to-peer file sharing, etc. You can block those, based on applications signatures or ports. This is all done for you. There is also, time block, allow messenger from 12 pm to 1 pm. If any website is block, the user is redirected to another page and the reason is specified. Bandwidth can be assigned. For example, if the amount of bandwidth exceeds a prefix number for a certain activity (application, web surfing), all is blocked and the reason is displayed, allocated bandwidth exceeded. I used this to measure the allocated bandwidth to us by our ISP.
Finally, the reporting feature. Well with the processor speed that I had, I only ran reports after disconnecting Websense. You can choose out of many reports and customize them. You can even delete information you don’t want to be included. Adult sites surfing habits!!
This is a quick run. But believe me try the software even if it is just for fun, it is worth it.
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