Block websites that provide games

Question

I have Windows Server 2008 and I want to block ALL websites that provide games. Can I do this using DNS?

The definition of *"ALL"* will only be as accurate as the site-content-classification-service which you use. No service will identify 100% of the sites providing "games". — jscott, Nov 04 '10 at 14:16
Block **all** websites that provide games? Impossible. Don't believe anyone who tells you differently. You can probably get results that are good enough for most people by using OpenDNS. — Rob Moir, Nov 04 '10 at 22:55

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Nov 04 '10 at 14:07

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Yes, I use opendns. they already have all these categorized so you just manage it from their website. Put the DNS on your router so that everyone that uses your router as a DNS server will use opendns to resolve IPs.

answered Nov 04 '10 at 14:07

mezzie

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score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Nov 04 '10 at 14:08

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You could use opendns as your dns server. They provide content filtering.http://www.opendns.com/

answered Nov 04 '10 at 14:08

heisenberg

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score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Nov 04 '10 at 14:14

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Your best bet is through a firewall if you have one in your network.

The catch is that if your users are computer savvy enough they can modify the TCP settings on their workstations to use an open DNS server such as Google's and in addition they can edit the hosts files on their windows systems to manually provide domain name resolution and or simply use the IP address in a browser if the site allows it.

A combination of multiple steps will block suggested sites.

answered Nov 04 '10 at 14:14

Nick O'Neil

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Firewall DNS traffic at the edge so that only your internal DNS servers can query public DNS servers. – ThatGraemeGuy Nov 04 '10 at 14:27
Only Admins / Power Users can modify network settings. Your users aren't in these groups, right? Also, I'll +1 what Graeme says. – Aaron Copley Nov 04 '10 at 15:28
yes of course just in speculation here since we are not for certain what the domain policy settings are set as. – Nick O'Neil Nov 04 '10 at 15:51

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Nov 04 '10 at 14:28

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If it is only few websites to block, you can edit the hosts file located in %systemdrive%/windows/system32/drivers/etc/hosts, and add corresponding entries to block the websites.

answered Nov 04 '10 at 14:28

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Mucking about with the hosts file is about *the* worst way I can think to manage this, or any thing else. If he's the sysadmin, he's probably managing DNS already. – jscott Nov 04 '10 at 23:02

score 0 · Answer 5 · answered Apr 13 '11 at 22:03

To be honest, DNS is not the best way to do this. Even though you can make a decent start, you should probably think about a proper web filter if you believe there may be more call for this sort of thing down the line. Web filters aren't expensive these days.

Block websites that provide games

5 Answers5