This site is not allowed on this network, OpenDNS

If you have a home network with more than one computer and you have kids you may want to take a look at OpenDNS. OpenDNS is a service that allow me to control what sort of web sites the computers on my network are allowed to visit.

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OpenDNS protects millions of people a day across hundreds of thousands of schools, businesses and homes as they navigate the Internet. We block phishing sites and give you the power to block adult sites, proxies and individual domains.

There is no software to install. To use OpenDNS I configured the DNS settings in my LinkSys router to use the name servers provided by OpenDNS; ( 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220 ). The web site provided detailed but simple instructions on how to do so. I could also have configured just a single computer or if I were a small business setup my internal name servers to use OpenDNS.

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To use the web filtering features of OpenDNS it was necessary to create an account. Once my account was created I could then specify which types of site I wanted to block, create a white list of sites I wanted to allow, and also add additional sites I wanted to restrict. Filter rules can be applied to an entire network, a single computer in a network, or multiple networks. I setup my brother-in-laws home network under my account but I have applied different filter rules to each network.

OpenDNS has a lot of other cool features but my favourite is the stats page. From here I can see how much traffic flows out from my home network as well as which sites are most popular and which are being blocked. Yikes! Looks like I need to spend some more time offline.

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Author: Khürt Williams

A human who works in information security and enjoys photography, Formula 1 and craft ale. #nobridge

3 thoughts on “This site is not allowed on this network, OpenDNS”

  1. Jireh,

    OpenDNS provides DNS services along with web filtering services. You or your system admin has configured the DNS entry for that PC to point to one of the OpenDNS servers. The IP for those servers is 208.67.220.220 or 208.67.222.222. One windows you can find the DNS entry for that PC by using the command line.

    The image looks like this: http://www.flickr.com/photos/khurt/2402603575/

    To change this in Windows go to Control Panel --> Network Connection: http://www.flickr.com/photos/khurt/2402610087/

    http://www.flickr.com/photos/khurt/2402619641/

    I hope that helps. If the DNS entry is supplied by the network then .... you will should talk to your network admin.

  2. hi! i stumbled upon your site while looking for remedies to the problem i'm currently having with one of our office pc. it's actually the server pc, we have 3 pc's here in the office and one laptop. this server pc is directly attached to the router.. well anyways, just this morning, i have logged on to the yahoo messenger using that pc and then later around lunch time, i tried to open my email account still with the same pc... but while clicking on the mail icon on yahoo's page and even typing yahoomail.com on the address bar, it doesn't direct me to the yahoo mail log in page but it redirects in this opendns site where it states that the site that i'm visiting is blocked in the network. but how com the other pc's and the laptop can log in to the same site that i would like to go to. can u help me? pls pls pls....

  3. personally I'm using it since 12 months ago (circa), coupling one of the public openDNS dns machines with one of the default DNS provided by my ISP to mantain a certain "coherence" of datas ...

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