01-15-2017 06:21 AM
As I have a family full of mobile devices and tablets, I have decided to block YouTube across the board. However, the one shared computer in the main room should have access for a variety of reasons. I have tried collecting all of the YouTube domains in use, perform an nslookup to determine their IP address, and add them to the local hosts files. I have been unsuccessful in accomplishing this.
I would also be open to just blocking youtube to the specific mobile devices (this would be the better option really), but I haven't yet found a way to do so with any of the features available to me by the router.
Has anyone successfully made this happen? Unfortunately, the personal network doesn't allow any kind of admin override that I can see. Ideas?
01-15-2017 04:06 PM
I certainly would not rely on an extensive list of hand coded IP addresses in a hosts file since Google seems to have a propensity for changing IP addresses.
There are no real details of your network or how it's configured, but presumably you are using OpenDNS Home. In that case one option would be to enable OpenDNS for the entire network, block youtube.com (or all of the categories that youtube.com belongs to) and use a different set of DNS servers for the shared computer.
There are a number of potential weaknesses to this, including the possibility that users could manually configure DNS servers on their devices, or in the case of things like Android, turning on data saver effectively bypasses DNS options. Also, since Google uses such a complicated list of domains to reach their different services, often including different domains for different apps on different mobile operating systems, and sometimes different domains for different versions it can be difficult to track down the proper domains. Complicating that is the possibility for an app to use IP addresses instead of domains, in which case OpenDNS has no way of even knowing about the app.
01-15-2017 06:08 PM
Manually overriding the DNS servers on the single computer is the only and best solution I have come to. I wish I had a better option.
01-15-2017 06:32 PM
Using a free OpenDNS Home account this is pretty much the only option. There are other options with some of the pay accounts or using a router that has LPC (Live Parental Controls). You would then have options (implemented in different ways) to control filtering for individual devices rather than the entire network.
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