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The concept of time intervals related to content filtering offers a way to define different web access policies based on the current time and day.

Before being able to assign time intervals to profiles they have to be defined. To do this go to Definitions -> Define time intervals
 

Figure 1. Define time intervals menu

Next, let’s add some time intervals by clicking the “Add interval” button.
 

Figure 2. Empty intervals list / Add interval button

The pop-up will require you to fill in the details of the new time interval:
 

Figure 3. Adding a new time interval

Let’s say we add a new interval for working hours:

• Fill in a descriptive name for your interval
• Select the weekdays you want the interval to apply
• Specify the time intervals (from hours:minutes to hours:minutes)

Figure 4. Adding “Work hours” interval example

As you can see we can add several time rules (days and hours) to an interval. The upper limit is 50 lines / Time Interval.

Figure 5. Adding several rules to an interval

You can use the green “+” button to add lines and the red “x” buttons to delete them. The first line can not be deleted because at least one line is required to have a valid time interval.

As you can see in the images above, time interval hours and minutes are inclusive at both ends. For example if you want to specify the hole hour between 09 AM and 10 AM, starting with 09:00.01 and ending with 9:59.59 you have to specify 09:00-09:59 in the lists.

After you finish defining your intervals you will see a list with all of them. You can edit any of them in the usual way (click the pen icon).

Figure 6. Review the list with the created time intervals

Now that we have some Time Intervals defined let’s go back to our Profiles and associate them with some categories.
 

Figure 1. Web access policy default time interval only.

On the left side you can see the list with the time intervals created in the previous article. Click on one of them, let’s say “Work Hours”.
 

Figure 2. Unused time interval.

Click on “Define custom policy during this time interval” and confirm it’s activation.
 

Figure 3. Confirm time interval policy activation for current profile.

Start checking and unchecking the categories for this interval of time.
 

Figure 4. Check / uncheck categories for time interval

When you are finished click “Ok” and observe that your time interval appeares in active time intervals zone on the left list.
 

Figure 5. Time interval with custom policy activated.

At this point we have a sophisticated profile setup. Let’s recap what our filtering does at this moment:

• Web Content Filtering on the Syneto Appliance is enabled and it is checking the categories of the sites the users visit
• We created a new Profile (called Employees in our examples) and associated it with a network interface
• When a user tries to access the Internet from the associated network, the profile will be matched, otherwise theDefault profile will be used
• If the Employee profile matches, the system will check for whitelisted URLs in the profile’s whitelist
• If the accessed URL is not whitelisted a category for it will be retrieved from cf.syneto.net
• The appliance will check the time to see if we are in a custom defined time interval
• If we are in our time interval (Work Hours in the example) the policy defined in that interval will be applied, if not the Default interval will be applied.
• The system will first check for a matching policy in Custom categories and apply it if matched
• If no Custom Category is matched the main category list will be applied
• If the type of the URL is “Uncategorized” access will be allowed