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I am running a small wireless network for a school (all computers are Windows) and would like to stop those that are using the Wireless Internet from hitting possibly banned web pages (e.g. redirecting a user from http://www.gamefaqs.com to http://www.mypage.com/banned.html). I need to only do this for a number of websites and can track these users down by IP and MAC Address if needed.

How would I redirect a user?

Note: I am fully aware of adult filters and these kinds of things, but this school only has a couple of computers and I would only like to block certain people from viewing certain websites, primarily to stop them cheating. Is there a way to do this from a basic wireless router?

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4 Answers

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buy an inexpensive whitebox PC with a few network cards and put astaro, or any number of opensource proxy/firewall/nat applications on it. there is a ton of support for most of these opensource applications available.

other suggestions: Ipcop or monowall/pfsense

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few suggestions, opendns.com http://www.astaro.com/ (Free, will require a dedicated user, will allow you to log users, urls, ip, mac and other info).

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I've already tried OpenDNS but they claim that their service will not allow you to redirect URL's as this feature could be used maliciously. – Ender Sep 3 '09 at 20:11
There is a way around that too. setup a webserver server on the local lan with error page you want to display when users visits a blocked site, create the host file on every machine to direct block.opendns.com to that server. That should do the trick, you can probably log that too if you use php or some other programming skills on that custom error page. – nysingh Sep 23 '09 at 20:43
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A very simple solution, although not completely bullet-proof is to use an alternative DNS provider. You could use OpenDNS to flag those sites very easily and show a page saying that it is banned. I believe OpenDNS will also provide statistics on who and when the violations occur. If OpenDNS will not work for you, you could provide your own DNS server and set up the domains you want to redirect to your own server which will log the violation and display the error page. This can be done very easily on a consumer router with 3rd party firmware like Tomato

The downside of this solution is that it is rather trivial to by-pass (for a determined user), by using a 3rd party DNS server. You could setup your firewall to block all DNS request to anything but OpenDNS/your DNS server and that would make it harder to get around.

HowToGeek: Easily Add OpenDNS To Your Router

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The short answer is that no, a Belkin router cannot do that. You will need something else.

One option is to go with a better router, for example one that can run tomato or openWRT -- those should be able to do the filtering/redirection you need.

Another option is to connect a computer and have it filter/redirect IPs. You can buy a cheap eeePC running Linux for the purpose.

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