Blocking Games

[pmerrill]

I have two teenage children, one that requires a little more focus on school work, so I've had to stop gaming during certain times of the day. I have tried many approaches, some work better than others and I thought I would document what seems to work for me and pass on to others.

Approach One - OpenDNS

If you create a free account with OpenDNS, then you can block games, youtube and anything else on your network. Just use Gargoyle and select OpenDNS as the DNS and prevent users from changing there DNS. This is also useful for blocking spam sites and other crap.

The downside is that you need to manually enable and disable games and I sometimes got a call from home asking for games to be turned on because I forgot to at the agreed time, very annoying.

Approach Two - Gargoyle Itself

Continue to use to OpenDNS but don't block games. Instead, set up the following rule. For selected hosts and selected times of the day under Remote Ports - Block All Except 25,53,80,443.

Now technically this does not block all games. If a game only uses port 80, then it will still work. However, luckily, most of the games the boy is interested in are WoW, LoL, COD, etc and those games always use other ports to communicate, so with this rule the games won't start. The nice thing is that the games turn on and off at the agreed times, nothing during the week and a little on the weekend. However, he can still use the web for school work.

There are probably ways around this as well and if he sets up a VPN or other proxies, then the battle will continue. Considering he's interested in pursuing a career in IT, I recon he's actually educating himself without knowing it, so I don't mind the technical battle!

[ispyisail]

yeah...............

I've been through similar issues and tried some of you solutions

In the end I've the antivirus bitdefender the best solution for blocking sites

One of problem with the opendns solution is all PCs behind the router have the same rule

[throughwalls]

Routers are cheap. Dedicate a $20 router with it's own wifi WPA2 key for the kids use.

I tried lots of options in my exploration. In the end the best solution was just limiting internet access to certain hours. On school nights internet turns automatically off at 10pm. Weekends is a little later.