It's not very exciting. I have a few routers lying around. At the moment I am using a technicolor router my isp gave me. It has stock firmware. I am using opendns with some extra sites added to the block list. It's main "feature" is that to switch to another set of dns servers, I have to edit a configuration file, send it to the router using a crap web interface and then reboot the router. The process takes about 10 minutes. It often doesn't work correctly, meaning I have to go through the process again, and sometimes again. So it is often 20-30 minutes before I have unfettered access to porn. I keep thinking of switching to a more sophisticated router. This little piece of shit is sitting on top of a freebsd box whose routing abilities would completely blow away my current setup. However, I actually like the fact that my routers reconfiguration process is so flaky. It acts as a deterrent like nothing else I've encountered. The main thing I have done to opendns is to configure it to aggressively block psub sites. That is how just about every relapse begins. I decide to look up some actress or musician I've just seen. Now all the sites that might contain large number of pictures are dead. There are still a few floating about, but they are difficult to find, so it becomes an ordeal rather than fun. It works well enough that now I don't even bother trying to look for anything. It got me through my last streak of 40-50 days. It looks like the same is happening again. The reason it stopped working last time was because I needed to switch to a different setup for a bit because it broke my xbox Internet connection, so all my safeguards were completely disabled. I have now fixed the problem with my xbox.
Thanks for these details. Actually I wonder how well opendns would work for me on its own... when I checked it I wasn't very happy with its blocking abilities, and that being said, it basically allowed like 50% of my favourite sites so I decided it was crap. But maybe I did something wrong, I could hardly believe that it works so unreliably... Because if you can use a DNS service that is really the simplest thing to setup and basically any router can do it. I sort of hate and love it at the same time to work on my router setup. Thing is the testing itself is really doing no good and triggers me too much - hell, even just having a glance into the host file and reading the domain names seems to be dangerous...
I needed to get an opendns account so I could configure it. I agree that the default settings didn't block nearly enough. Maybe write a small tool that will append a url to the end of the file. That way you don't have to look at the file itself.
I've done the following: Log into my router. Locate the DNS settings. Change the DNS addresses to family safe IPs. (The IPs I've used are 208.67.222.123 and 208.67.220.123) Save the configuration. Reboot the router. (The settings may take longer to apply in some cases.) Done. This method blocks 99% of all unwanted websites on all devices on the network. As for ads, I use an ad blocker so I'm not sure if it works in that regard but I'm guessing it does. No system is perfect, and if you really want to get around the filter you definitely can but it's a nice reminder that you probably shouldn't be looking at those sites. For more info on how family safe IPs work visit this link: https://www.opendns.com/about/press...ols-the-easiest-way-to-keep-kids-safe-online/ Heffe
I'll be honest..i haven't read most of the thread but this.. Google "family shield" from opendns Might be what you are looking for.. It helped me
