Configuring Netscape for document viewing only..

[Akihiro Noma]

I am a new UNIX adminstrator and I need some help in installing Netscape 4.7.4 on HP-UX 10.20.

I need to use Netscape only for viewing on-line documentation for SAS but not for accessing Internet. I was told that putting Netscape on the UNIX box can be a security concern..

How can I configure Netscape so that it will not access Internet? Or is there a viewer that read all the HTML document?

thanks for your help..

Aki

[Kofi ARTHIABAH]

You can play a trick to prevent your less-knowledgable users from accessing the internet with netscape.

Go to Edit, Preferences... Click on the + on Advanced, Proxy, select Manual Proxy, and click View - in the for the "Address of Proxy to use", enter localhost for each of the services listed.

This above will tell netscape that when a user enters http://www.thisdomain.com it tries to contact through the localhost (but that is not running a proxy so the request will fail!)

to access the documents, you would have to use the file:// syntax.

Good luck

[Shannon Petry]

Kofi is absolutely correct, but this may be un-necessary. I'll assume that your box's which need nescape have direct routes to the internet?
if so, a user will probably be able to remove the proxy settings and use the network directly anyway. There is a way to make a master copy of "liprefs.js" which does sets up the proxy settings. It will be in $HOME/.netscape. Make the master copy as Kofi mentioned. Then copy it to the users directory with Read Access for the user, but root ownership. If the environment changes frequently, then make a wrapper which does this for you!
Also alias netscape or in your wrapper to open the doc's you need. This is easy because any argument given to netscape without a switch is treated as a url. I.E.
if the master page for the docs are in "/usr/local/doc/index.html" then
csh
$ alias netscape 'netscape /usr/local/doc/index.html'
ksh
> alias netscape='netscape /usr/local/doc/index.html'
This will give your users direct access to the docs, and no ability to hit the internet.

Best regards,
Shannon