Question: Google DRIVE blocked by Parental Controls in Mac 10.11

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Carol LaRow

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Jan 8, 2016, 5:44:50 PM1/8/16
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MacBookAir, brand new as of January 2016, running El Capitan, 10.11.1

I have activated Parental Controls, but it's blocking Google DRIVE.
I can access: Google Gmail, Calendar, Finance, Sites, Groups, etc.

I have customized WEB access and have typed in several Google Drive paths (based on reading what others have said).
No matter what I try, I still get, "not authorized" message.

I have ALLOWED:


I do have YouTube blocked.

Nothing is working.
Any advice would be welcome.


Devon Jacobs

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Jan 13, 2016, 1:36:53 PM1/13/16
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Welcome to one of my gripes with Drive.... 
for a long time now, Google in their infinite wisdom has been using https://youtube.com as part of the authentication chain for drive. This causes much pain if you want to block youtube at school and you're not running deep packet inspection on your filter or, like in your case, you want to use parental controls on your mac. 
We were blocking secure youtube because kids found they could skirt the edu filters by simply opening a new google presentation doc and inserting a video (which uses https to search for and play the video). We had to stop blocking secure youtube because it completely broke drive.
Recently, we have switched to using Restricted YouTube within our GAFE org which works a bit better than the edu filter did and can be enforced for your entire network (or parts of it) if you control your own DNS.

One thing you might try for your case is to open the parental controls on the mac as an admin and scan through the blocked sites (after trying to get to drive and having it blocked). find the full https://youtube.com/{whatever}/ URL (I think it's something like https://youtube.com/auth/{service and token after that}) and ALLOW the first part of the path. That would allow youtube.com/auth but not youtube.com/watch

Stephen Gale

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Jan 13, 2016, 3:47:33 PM1/13/16
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Worth looking into-  as Devon mentioned, Google's authentication chain is rather complicated.  As such, there are certain sites which Google requires access to.  I've used this support article as my guide to help grant access to Google's Authentication:


Under "How to set up networks with SSL content filters", there is a list of websites that Chromebooks need to authenticate.  At present, the list is:


Now - what all of these is required for Drive - couldn't tell you.  But it would be worth adding to your whitelist.

larowc

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Jan 13, 2016, 6:21:25 PM1/13/16
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Devon,

Thank you so much for the post.
I will definitely try this.

I think you are saying if I allow "part" of the YouTube URL, it will allow DRIVE.
Am I correct?

This is NOT in a school setting. It's a single MacBookAir (not a Chromebook), in a home setting.

I have ALLOWED the following, but it did not work:

Carol
1/13/16

larowc

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Jan 13, 2016, 6:24:37 PM1/13/16
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Stephen,

Thank you for this reply too. I will read everything you sent.

I do not have a proxy server. This is a single MacBook Air in a home.
There's a modem and a Netgear router.  Different computers, an iPad, and a Chromebook all use
the home network. I've only blocked one laptop - a new MacBook Air.

I'd like to block YouTube also. The Parental Controls are not blocking the inappropriate videos
when I've used the ratings.

Thank you so much for the reply.

Carol
1/13/16

Stephen Gale

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Jan 15, 2016, 3:02:21 PM1/15/16
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Although you're not using a Proxy server, when the sites listed in the SSL Decryption Setup are blocked (in part or fully) there is a break in the authentication/profile download.

I would try and unblock all the sites on the list and see if that fixes the issue.  Then, if desired, you can cut them back, one at a time, to isolate those which are needed for your purpose.
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