Blocking internet access for a single user

First off let me just say that it is in my experience that it is never a good idea to try to use technology to police employee’s. If your employee wastes to much of their day surfing the internet instead of doing work then just fire them. Instead we have so many products trying to force them not to surf or to surf properly and their are always loop holes. In the worst of scenario’s you have the request “This user has been surfing inappropriately, prevent them from surfing the internet”, talk about bludgeoning the issue with a rock, I would think a little finesse here in order. That being said if you are in this situation there is a quick easy way to accomplish this without the need of a lot of effort or expensive software.

1) Get the MAC address of the computer
2) Use DHCP to create a reservation for that MAC so that it always gets the same IP
3) Create a firewall rule blocking port 80 traffic coming from that IP

Bingo!