Block iOS updates

[katastrophe]

So I work for a small business in the middle of nowhere which (being in the middle of nowhere) has HughesNet for internet. I installed Gargoyle at the beginning of the month to help me figure out why we'd been running over our data cap two months running, and so far it's been a big help.

This morning I came in to discover nearly a sixth of our monthly allowance had been used yesterday afternoon. We have two iPads and a number of employee phones connecting to the wireless, and apparently, turning off auto-updates in iOS is just a comforting lie Apple tells you; iOS devices are going to download operating system updates no matter what.

Following some directions I found elsewhere, I attempted to create an Access Restriction that blocked only the domains "appldnld.apple.com" and "mesu.apple.com" as Website URLs (using "all hosts except" to exclude my desktops). This worked a little too well; iOS devices could no longer load anything. Then I tried creating an exception where I permitted all website URLs except those two. Now everything loads, including updates.

Does anyone have suggestions for doing this? I can't afford the next "fix" Apple sends me eating up gigs of precious bandwidth, but we use these devices as part of the business so I really need them working otherwise.

Thanks in advance for any help!

[Lantis]

Use opendns.
Due to the encrypted nature of those updates you can't domain block them.

[katastrophe]

Thank you! Dug around until I found some instructions for setting up Gargoyle and OpenDNS, and now the iOS devices are running on the net but trying to load the software update throws an error. Fingers crossed this will deal with auto-updates as well. Cheers for the tip!