Lock down homepage setting in IE

mquinlivan · #1 October 29th, 2003, 10:42 PM

Hi All

I am a sysadmin at a school. I wish to restrict users from being able to set the home page in IE, so I blocked access to the Tools|Internet Options menu item with our lockdown software (called HandsOff). Now, although they cannot change this manually, if they happen to browse to a page that prompts if you want to change your home page to this page, and they click Yes, it changes the default home page.

My first question is:
Is there any way to lock this down fully? (eg registry setting?) I was using IE5.5, and recently upgraded it to IE6 SP1, and applied MS Oct 03 cumulative patch for IE, so perhaps this may fix it.

Second question is:
How can I test that this works. That is, what is the HTML source used for prompting a user if they want to set the home page to the current page? I will then create a page with this in it and see if it changes IE's hompage

Thanx in advance
MQ

**degsy** · #2 October 30th, 2003, 12:27 AM

Spybot seems to deny permission for sites to change the homepage

It's in the immunize section
http://security.kolla.de/

Here is an IE onclick script

Code:

<script type="text/javascript" language="javascript1.2">
<!--
/*
Add-to-favorites Script
Created by David Gardner (toolmandav@geocities.com)
No warranty of any kind comes with this script!
Permission granted to Dynamic Drive (http://dynamicdrive.com)
to post and feature this script on their DHTML archive
*/

//configure the two variables below to match yoursite's own info
var bookmarkurl="http://www.cybertechhelp.com"
var bookmarktitle="Cyber Tech Help"

function addbookmark() {
  if (document.all)
    window.external.AddFavorite(bookmarkurl,bookmarktitle)
}

// -->


</script>
</head>

<body>
<a href="javascript:" onClick="this.style.behavior='url(#default#homepage)';this.setHomePage('http://www.google.co.uk');"> 
Click here to make this your default homepage.</a>

**degsy** · #3 October 30th, 2003, 12:28 AM

btw,
java_script_
should be javascript

remove the two underscores
it's changed because of board security

**degsy** · #4 October 30th, 2003, 01:02 AM

you can also set it manually via

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Inte rnet Explorer\Control Panel
and setting the homepage value to 1

Steven.Bentley · #5 November 1st, 2003, 09:15 PM

You could create a .reg file that sets the browser homepage and have that run at login time, and it will overwrite whatever setting the use has made - even better if you can have that run from a server, then should you want to change the URL you can do it globally in one go.

You might want to look into Active Directory if you have a lot of machines, the Group Policy Objects system really is very good, I was able to change the home page URL of all of our student PCs (I work at a uni) to our online enrollment site when required via a GPO.

mquinlivan · #6 November 5th, 2003, 12:34 AM

Thanks degsy, that registery key works!!

Steven, im not sure if I can use Active directory, etc,as I have old Win95, 98 machines....

Thanks all for yourhelpand sorry about the late reply, ive been away a couple of days

MQ