To those who do not want to use complicated Internet Filtering Software you can set-up the web-boosting, attack-preventing OpenDNS service to work with your router and drill down on specific prevention measures. You can filter by category or content, block specific sites, pop up custom warning messages and keep logs of web activity.

OpenDNS is a perfect solution for people who either lack the time or expertise to set up and administer a full-out content-filtering server. OpenDNS replaces your current DNS server and allows you to filter every connection coming out of your house if you change the DNS settings at the router level. No matter if someone is on your main desktop or connecting into your wireless via laptop, everything will be filtered by OpenDNS. You can set custom filters to white list and black list specific sites and customize the range of filters they provide for you.

Below are the Step by step instructions on how to configure your routers using OpenDNS:

The first thing you will want to do is sign up for a free account and download the OpenDNS Updater application.  OpenDNS will automatically detect your IP address and will prompt you to create a name and download the Updater application.

After signing up go to your Dashboard where you can start creating rules for filtering, manage your administrator settings, and add additional networks.  Basically your dashboard is where you will make all changes you need.  If you ever get stuck or have questions they also have a cool support system which includes a knowledge base and user forum.

Next step is to take a look at filtering content.  From your dashboard click on Settings.  You will then be prompted to choose a basic filtering level from None to High.  This might be a good choice if you want to easily filter out several categories.  To view what the categories are in each level just click on View for a detailed look.

This is an example of the detailed categories in the Low filter setting.  This helps you choose what types of content you want blocked.

Here is a list of all the categories available to block through OpenDNS.  As you can see this service will work for your children as well as any user on your network and also for business.

You can choose a filtering level and add customized domain filtering to it, or completely customize everything.  Probably one of the more publicized social sites you may want to block your child from is MySpace so I will use it as my example.  Below the filtering levels you will see Manage individual domains.  This is where you can get more specific in what your filtering.  The two options are Never Block or Always Block.

Just type in the address of the site to block and click on the Add Domain button.  You can then choose to just block the domain or better yet, block all of the categories in the sub-domain.  This means although you block myspace.com if you do not block the sub-domains within the user can access some of the content.  Any changes you make will take about 3 minutes to update.

Once you have created all of your filters and a user tries to go to a blocked site they will get a message telling them it is blocked and why.  This is the standard message they will get.

Another cool feature is the ability to customize the message the user sees.  You can customize it with say your company logo or a picture of yourself.  So if you child tries to go to a pornography site and they see a picture of their parent … well … that might urge them to never try that again!  Below is an example of a custom message.

You can also get statistic logs  which will show you what type of traffic was blocked and other stats to allow you to better filter content.

For more information Visit OpenDNS at

http://www.opendns.com