Parental Software - free.

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bigstusexy

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Jan 28, 2002
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If it were for an entire network and for lost of money I'd know suggestions :D

I'm looking for some free software to put on a computer to stop them from getting to general smut sites and pirating. I've heard that OpenDNS has this, any experience with that, does it do a good job?
 
OpenDNS works pretty well. It's free. I've got some friends and family setup with that that didn't want to run a dedicated box like Untangle or Astaro to protect their internets.
 
OpenDNS is awesome for this. Just make sure that you use the IP updater if it is a dynamic address.

and that the kiddies do not know how to change DNS info ;)
 
If it is only for one or two machines you can always use k9webprotection.com

Works great, and free.
 
i would ask how computer savy they are in the PC world and if you are running vista on their machine.

I have used several:
Consumer research thoughts
Here are the ones that I have tried...
Netnanny - NOT FREE, but was awesome! Took a while to authorize becuase it blocked damn near everything.
Parental controls in Vista works pretty good and if you have vista it is free. Kind of a pain as it is very generic, but when you block one thing you might be blocking something you want to allow...you will have to play with it. I am currently using this one.

Cyber patrol - it was a pain for me, but could have been an older version. Just about blocked every program, but very indepth.

i did a quick search and found this, but i am not familiar with it....sounds like what you want as well
Safe Families - looks like what you are looking for, but I havent tried it.
 
Thanks everyone I took a look at OpenDNS and it seems awesome! So many categories and the fact that I can add what I want to it too! Also the shortcuts are great so that I can add say "stu" for when they need to get to my ddns url as a shortcut. I'll look into the other but this seems like a good start. If I could get OpenDNS to log what they went to that would be even better!

The fact of the matter is that I don't see them often and their mother doesn't do it. I didn't buy them a cmoputer so these almost highschoolers can browse porn and pirated stuff all day. This will help me do something towards that end. Also today they will be joining my VPN. I just had VNC on their computer but someone learned what the icon did and searched to learn how to shut it off, no more!



Thanks Again.
 
I believe OpenDNS logs each time a user attempts to access a restricted domain.
 
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but if you setup a proxy in firefox, it doesn't resolve the name locally; the name resolution is done remotely.

So opendns wouldn't work in this case. Just something to keep in mind.
 
bigstusexy said:
Thanks everyone I took a look at OpenDNS and it seems awesome! So many categories and the fact that I can add what I want to it too! Also the shortcuts are great so that I can add say "stu" for when they need to get to my ddns url as a shortcut. I'll look into the other but this seems like a good start. If I could get OpenDNS to log what they went to that would be even better!

The fact of the matter is that I don't see them often and their mother doesn't do it. I didn't buy them a cmoputer so these almost highschoolers can browse porn and pirated stuff all day. This will help me do something towards that end. Also today they will be joining my VPN. I just had VNC on their computer but someone learned what the icon did and searched to learn how to shut it off, no more!



Thanks Again.
Click to expand...
OpenDNS does log what they try to go to if it's on the blocked list. If it's not blocked then it's not logged. The downside to the logging is it won't tell you specifically which machine was blocked if there are more than one machine.
 
Oneos said:
I believe OpenDNS logs each time a user attempts to access a restricted domain.
Click to expand...

Correct. We used it at work when he had a problem employee, and it worked fine. It wasn't perfect, but then again, that could have been due to our poor network setup (see my thread started today :p)

I would definitely recommend trying it though. Can't beat free. I'd give it another go if there was a need.
 
Thanks for the suggestion of OpenDNS. Started using it tonight - absolutely awesome free service!
 
QwertyJuan said:
what I said earlier, but was ignored! ;)

Best free protection out there. Bar none.
Click to expand...

You weren't ignored, I'm still looking at that product and if I need to do more guess whats going in! :D

They aren't super savvy and the main one that would be an issue can't even figure out how to take a pirated ISO and burn it with image burn which I gave them on the original install long ago.


Since they are now a member of my VPN (I hope the fact that I didn't setup a DMZ doesn't bite me later) I'll be checking in on them every now and then.


P.S. The reason they had a problem in the first place? The 80GB drive in the system had 0 bytes of free space. I'm actually surprised windows booted.
 
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