Router / firewall to block specific pages?

Why? Are people on your network consuming huge amounts of bandwidth downloading music from iTunes, or do you have a control freak PHB who likes to control what people do?

A cheap DFL-700 will block by key words or segments, it will also block downloading of content in HTTP sessions - so you could block *.xyz and they could not download .xyz files.

Maybe it's because people should be "Working" at a "office" and not downloading songs, since I would guess that songs don't have any business purpose in most cases.

Ummm... Actually, yes, we do want to control what people do at work. And, oddly enough, we want it to be... Work.

Thanks for your helpful >

At my workplace, the similar policy came down from our President, acting on the strong advice of our corporate lawyers that it would be a Really Good Idea to follow the firm policy ordered by the Treasury Board, which has strong authority to regulate how our branch of the government operates. The Treasury Board was acting on the strong advice of its lawyers. As best I've been able to gather, they had been asked to -investigate- a question by the appropriate Federal Cabinet Minister, and become very much concerned when their analysis was that if there were a commercial lawsuit, that the government would almost certainly lose and have to pay several tends of millions of dollars.

Nothing in the process involved a "control freak PHB": it was more like, "Is this something we need to worry about??" and the sharks looked at it and said "Oh Boy! We'd be up the excremented creek for sure!"

Tweren't about control: it was about ducking big lawsuits.

At one of our sister-branches, the ISP "excess bandwdith" charges traced to music downloads were (as best I recall after these years), $C20,000 for 3 months. So for them it became a very direct equation: stop the music to stop the bills, or lay a couple of people off in order to apply the salaries saved towards payment of the bills for the luxary.

I wonder what you would say if you had just been told, "I'm sorry, Mr. Soda Ant; we have been very happy with your work, but we cannot afford to retain you; it was either keep you or block your co-workers from running up our ISP bills by downloading music; we don't want to risk the possibility that someone would think we were control-freak PHBs if we blocked the music, so we decided it was better economize your salary so that we could let them play on." ?

How many keywords or segments can the DFL-700 block? We have a Netgear VPN, but the number of keywords is very limited (about two dozen) and we need to block several hundred.

Best, Christopher

You've asked the same thing in three different posts, you need a firewall with the functions you desire, and it's easier to block all and provide access to only what you need.

Look up any of the fine solutions that are real firewall appliances, not the cheap NAT solutions.

Sorry, no one seems to know the answer. I contacted D Link tech support, and they don't know. I downloaded the user manual, and it's not answred there. My apologies for trying so hard to find the anwer.

Best, Christopher

Because there is no direct answer - the device as NVRAM, you can put as much into it as it will hold, there are not hard limits to X rules, it holds as much as you can fit.

So, if you do:

Blacklist: *.*

Then Whitelist: someplace.com, someotherplace.com

Users will only be able to reach the two white listed places, which takes little internal memory, but, if you want to blacklist a LOT of places, instead of white listing, well, you should be able to get the idea.

I've got a list with more than 100 white listed items and *.* for blacklist, but, that doesn't mean you can get the same.

Oh, and the rules permit *microsoft.com/* or you can block *.pdf and people can'd download PDF's :)