Gavin McCullagh wrote:
Hi,
On Sun, 16 Dec 2007, Todd O'Bryan wrote:
Does anyone know how to make Firefox safe for giving online tests? I'd
like to prevent students from navigating to different sites, going to
different programs, and even from using Copy/Paste while they're
taking a test. I realize this is pretty difficult, because you also
have to prevent the OS from letting them close the browser or using
any of the OS-level keyboard shortcuts, but surely this is a problem
someone has solved before?
It looks like you can do this using firefox extensions such as this one:
http://procon.mozdev.org/index.html
http://www.glubble.com/
However, my approach to stopping people going to different sites would be
on a network level, not locking the browser. Blocking one application
allows them to still use others. For example, the command line browser w3m
would still be there (it's in ubuntu by default) and it wouldn't be locked.
If you block it at the network level, no browser would be able to connect
out.
As regards locking them to firefox only, I'd look at setting up a kiosk.
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/EdubuntuFAQ#head-1160489d41f8199cc1c7fcd9850bb5c60863f12b
which automatically launches firefox without gnome. You can change the
dhcp so that certain clients boot as kiosks just for the day of the exam.
Given that they should have no way to launch other applications, I guess
the firefox extension would work with it too.
Gavin
I have done this before (at another school) at the network level with a
transparent <http://freshmeat.net/articles/view/1433/> dansguardian
machine. When it would come time for the test, I would run a script that
would alter the iptables & ebtables settings so that dansgaurdian was
fired up and running. I put the easy sites for cheating (wikipedia,
search engines, et. al.) on the bannedsitelist. This was a lot of work
to setup, but hey it worked. I wished that I still had the list and the
script.
The key to the script was to call the following on ebtables and
iptables to activate the filter
ebtables -t broute -A BROUTING -p IPv4 --ip-protocol 6
--ip-destination-port 80 -j redirect --redirect-target ACCEPT
iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -i br0 -p tcp --dport 80 -j REDIRECT
--to-port 8080
And to deactivate
ebtables -t broute -F
iptables -t nat -F
JO
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