Another Way of Blocking YouTube Traffic And Other Porn Sites

I made a post few months back saying that I need to build myself a firewall/proxy server (preferably Squid) for Innerchild – our small LAN/Internet shop.

Why? Some kids accidentally browse sites that is not intended to be seen by them. Not sure, if it’s from some pop-up advertisement or intentional, but I intend to block them out either way.

Besides porn sites, I also plan to block (or limit) the access on Yutube. Some online gamers often times complain that they experience slowness (lags) when playing and I am pretty sure that Yutube – that bandwidth hog website – is causing this.

The Solution

Installing a proxy server powered by Linux is as simple as downloading the source and configuring it on some old computer gathering dust on the corner of the house.

But there’s an easy and faster way. By using an already installed firewall that is block the traffic from the router. (geez, Eli why didn’t think of that in the first place?)

The Device

For sharing the super fast Smart Bro internet connection, Innerchild is using a Linksys WRT54GS Wireless-G Broadband Router with speedboster.

This is one fantastic device. It is really3 devices in one box. All of which are being utilized (so we get our money’s worth)… More on that device soon…

This device is the one we use to block out some websites that is not suitable for young children, or websites that compromises overall performance of the internet connectivity of Innerchild.

How Does It Work

Firewall baby! You set up some parameters and the router obeys. It’s as simple as answering the question “Which website are you trying to block?” which in our case yutube and other porn sites… And some Peer to peer traffic (except on the server of course).

First, you have to configure the router for some basic info – like the ip address, subnet, admin user and password and those stuff. We’ll discuss the details on the next post or future post. (Remind me. :D)

Once that’s all done, point your browser to your router’s IP Adresss. On this case it’s 192.168.1.1. You’ll be greeted with this page:

For setting up what we want it to do, click the “Access Restriction” tab. You’ll be prompted with a user name and password. Supply it to continue. You’ll then be brought to this page:

You’ll notice I have Flashget running.. :D

Anyway, there’s some things that you will need to fill up. First, the Acesss Policy. There are 10 available rules you can make. I named this one “Restricted Sites”

Status: Enable

Edit List of PC: Our configuration is 192.168.1.200 -192.168.1.210. What’s important though is to select the range or specific IP where this particular rule will apply to.

Day: Everyday

Hour: 24 hour – tyrant eh?

Now, you can either block websites by URL or by keyword. You can see here that I used both. It’s up to you to decide what is best.

There you go. Just click save and exit. To test, just browse (or at least try to) the site that are in the denied rule set. If you had trouble, you did good!

There, bandwidth saved. Time for coffee…

2 Responses to “Another Way of Blocking YouTube Traffic And Other Porn Sites”

1. Reyn says:

   October 13, 2007 at 11:15 am

   I did this with the house router and my sis just used the proxy browsing sites to get to the websites I blocked.

2. Elizar says:

   October 14, 2007 at 4:28 am

   Good point there Reyn.. I suppose I may need to block those proxy sites too huh? Good thing the router also blocks by (meta) keywords and not just URLs