Hi team, I am using opendns for the first time because i want to see what sites my stepson is visiting. am i able to establish this using open dns?

[marcus53]

 I am using opendns for the first time because i want to see what sites my stepson is visiting. am i able to establish this using open dns?

Can you tell me what request types ie txt mean?

and are domains able to lead me to a web address?

thanks 

[mattwilson9090]

There is a very loose correlation between DNS lookups and sites that are actually visited, but it does not in any way give you a clear picture of what anyone is doing on the internet. For instance, going to the home page of a sports related site could easily result in a dozen or more DNS lookups. Not just for the domain of the site itself, but other domains that the website uses to provide content, as well as lookups related to ads that are carried on the pages of the website that have absolutely nothing to do with the content of the site itself.

You can try typing a domain name into your browser and see what happens. In many cases it will lead you to a website, but it often won't, and since it isn't a URL it won't tell you the actual page that someone visited.

Although OpenDNS is very, very good at blocking undesired internet activity by blocking domain names, it's not an accurate way to tell what internet activity is happening on your network. For that kind of tracking you'd need something at your local network, such as your router, if it has that capability.

[marcus53]

thanks Matt  for the reply do you know of any software that will do that? i have dynalink router with voip capabiltiy

[marcus53]

what about wallwatcher converting ip's to url's?

[mattwilson9090]

No, I don't know of any software that will do that kind of tracking or logging, or at least no consistently since it would need to be installed and running on every device on the network to track everything that's going on (and even then it would need to report back to a centralized "server" of some sort to be effective). The only effective and guaranteed way to track that kind of traffic is with a router or proxy through which all the internet traffic would pass.

I'm not familiar with dynalink, but even the most low-end consumer grade routers I've seen have some capability for logging internet traffic or connections, with higher end "firewalls" having very comprehensive capabilities.

I have no idea what wallwatcher is, but there is no way to directly translate a raw IP address to a URL. For one thing, depending on how the server is configured, a single IP address could host multiple websites, and another, even if you could reliably determine a one to one relationship between address and site, you'd likely only end up at the home page, not a specific page or other resource on that site, which is what a URL does.

[rotblitz]

As mattwilson9090 said, this can be done locally only.  One of the many solutions would be (free) Fiddler (http://www.telerik.com/fiddler).  You install this on a computer or your router, possibly together with a (free) DHCP server program distro and get all devices to connect through this computer (= proxy server) and no longer directly to the router (unless Fiddler resides there).  Then you can granularily log all web traffic including all details about the devices in your network being used.

[rotblitz]

"I am using opendns for the first time because i want to see what sites my stepson is visiting."

You may get some idea only about websites being visited (web traffic) with using the OpenDNS stats.  But these stats give you a clear picture about the DNS activity on your network.  As mattwilson9090 said, DNS traffic and web traffic are not very related to each other.  DNS is the phone book of the internet, not the phone lines.

"Can you tell me what request types ie txt mean?"

Sure, see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_DNS_record_types or https://support.opendns.com/entries/25976199

"and are domains able to lead me to a web address?"

I assume by "web address" you mean a URL like https://www.example.com/topic/subtopic/index.html ?
Well, the part "www.example.com" is the domain as part of the URL which would appear in your OpenDNS stats.  If the related DNS query was caused by an attempt to visit a website (not necessarily the case), then the visit could have been to any URL hosted under this domain.  URLs are not part of the DNS protocol, therefore this cannot be part of your OpenDNS stats too.  Therefore a domain never can lead you to a full URL.