Router based web redirect rather than block?

Hey the easiest way to do this is to change your dns server to opendns.com and block the types of sites (or individual sites) on a strict dns level. I assume you’re using dhcp. If you are, you should change the dns settings that are delivered to the clients to the router ip address. Within the router you would change the dns settings to the servers given to you by opendns.

I use this free service at work to block pornography from work computers. It’s neat because it will show you how many times your users have tried to go to your blackballed pages. The only way around this is to actually enter the ip address of the computer that’s hosting the webpage in the address bar. Most users don’t think about doing that.

It’s pretty simple and it’s free. I could also walk you through a redirect with iptables probably but it wouldn’t keep track of when your users tried to access those pages.

*also you’ll make a personalized account on opendns.com and you’ll have a dashboard you can look at.

I use tomato and ipcop at my house. I have used dd-wrt and micro dd-wrt in the past. It looks like there’s already a way to do what you want to do in the settings:

http://www.instructables.com/id/URL-Redirect-Prank-using-dd-wrt/

But it still does it on a strict DNS level. You could probably get around this little trick with the machines ip address too.

Oooooo… I never thought of opendns. Nice!

And thanks for that second link! I’ll check it out right now!

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The only thing that sucks about that is that it’s not ip based so I can’t limit it to just their computer. So if my wife wants to go on, she’ll get the questionable site I’m redirecting them to. But since it can be done, there has to be a way to do it in access restrictions
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If you decide to go with the opendns, there’s a way around that.

On your wife’s computer you can manually put in the dns settings from your ISP. That way she’ll be able to look at whatever she wants and the kids will be redirected to the opendns page because they’ll get the automatic opendns DNS servers through DHCP.

Nice! I’ve been pounding away at iptables for an hour now trying to get it to do what I want with no luck so I’ll try to get opendns to work for me then. Thanks again!

Alright so I got it setup, but the thing that does suck is that I would want to be able to turn this on and off and can’t do that with this. Regardless it’ll work for now until I can figure out how to setup the iptables correctly. Thanks for the help bodyhead!

Hey you can always leave it on and you can just activate the block and deactivate it on demand. It only takes about 2 minutes for something to be blocked or unblocked. You could actually just use their categories to block all social networking whenever you need to.

Maybe I’ll dig out my notes on iptables later. I hate it with a passion.

I do too. Such a PITA and I haven’t had to do anything with my own stuff for the past year or two. Linux. Gotta love it.